Prioritize Legacy over UEFI boot

[Anonymous546753]

Hello,

I have a little problem with my HP Elitebook 850 G4 notebook.

The notebook came with Windows 10 Home 64 bit pre installed and everything worked and still works fine.

However, I need to be able to boot Linux Kali (and some other Linux distros) from a live usb.

So here's the problem...

Whatever I try, Windows 10 always boots instead of my Linux distro.

I've tried with multiple distros, and all usb ports, but nothing seems to help.

On my other laptops and PC they all work fine. If there's no usb in, Windows 10 boots. If there's a usb in, Linux boots. Exactly what I want. However this doesn't seem to work on this HP Elitebook 850 G4 so the problem really has to do with the settings of this laptop.

I've disabled secure boot and enabled legacy boot, and I changed the boot order to usb first, ssd second (which contains my Windows 10 OS). But still Windows 10 kept booting even if there was a usb inserted.

After a while I was able to find the problem. This laptop has a UEFI and that caused all the confusions.

The boot order now is the following:

1. UEFI usb

2. UEFI ssd

3. Legacy usb

4. Legacy ssd

My Windows 10 needs a UEFI ssd boot while my linux distros need a legacy usb boot. 

If I disable UEFI boot, it works if I insert a live usb. Then it will boot the Linux distro. Because it will skip UEFI boots and immediatily go to 3. Legacy usb. But if I don't have a usb inserted, Windows won't boot anymore since it will try a legacy boot and it won't work.

So i want the following:

1. Legacy usb

2. UEFI ssd

I can't seem to do this since the only thing I can do is either enable/disable UEFI or legacy.

It always seems like UEFI will get prioritized over legacy. 

I can boot into Linux now to be clear, but then I have to spam 'esc' key in the beginning and choose from which source to boot.  This is quite annoying in my honest opinion.

Anyone could help me how I could prioritize Legacy USB over UEFI ssd with both Legacy and UEFI enabled?

Thank you in advance!

[jorkki]

With UEFI you use  a boot manager of some kind. With only Windows installed, you can use two, the built in one in the system firmware or the Windows boot manager.

To access the built in one, keep hitting F9 when you power on until you get the menu (By hitting Esc you first get the Startup Menu as you probably already know).

The Windows tools seem to be geared more toward managing the Windows boot manager environment (surprise).

bcdboot command allows you to add the boot environments for several different Windows versions and the bcdedit command allows you to edit the boot menu entries.

Maybe the Linux tools are more versatile (as usual). I have not played with the efibootmgr though.

Then I have also seen a program called EasyUEFI mentioned that should let you make the boot order as you please but no experience with that either.

The screen shot on their page looks kind of promising as it lists a USB device as well. I was wondering about the removable devices in my little mind before I saw that.

https://www.easyuefi.com/index-us.html

For me it has been enough to use the F9 method as I don't boot the other OSes so often. Mostly the backup  WinPE USB HD every now and then.