Booting from different EFI systems

[jonander83]

Hi! I'm testing my new setup with two disks: One of them on linux and the other one with windows 10.

I installed windows 10 perfectly, and then, linux and created another efi partition for its own disk.

In the end, i have /dev/sda with windows and all its efi and recovery partitions and /dev/sdb with an efi partition and another partition for root.

The thing is that I'm unable to see /dev/sdb 's efi partition when I hit F12 upon the VM's startup. Is this a Virtualbox limitation or is it not possible to have two different EFI partitions in the same system?


The reason why i have two partitions is because I want both systems to be independent. If /dev/sda crashes, I still want to be able to boot from /dev/sdb (hence the efi partition on this one) and vice versa. /dev/sdb1 (the linux efi partition) would boot a grub menu with windows and linux options to boot from.

As said: Am I doing something wrong or is it just Virtualbox unable to see the second efi partition on /dev/sdbX? (I repeat, I can only see the Efi partition created by windows on /dev/sda)

Thanks!

[Perryg]

VirtualBox creates a single large file *.vdi to store the actual guest is unless you are using raw access. And it stores the file where your preferences indicate it is suppose to install it unless you intervene at install time. check your install and look closely at the actual location of both. The log file for each should show the absolute path to each guest. One other thing, since the guests are separate anyway it really makes not difference if the guests are on different partitions. Unless you mean the hosts hard drive crashes.

[scottgus1]

One possibility is there's only one virtual disk with multiple partitions.

The Virtualbox F12 boot choice is equivalent to a similar F-key combo in modern BIOSes, to allow you to choose the physical drive to boot from before the drive has been read by the PC. The boot F-key combo cannot see the partitions on the drive because the disk hasn't been touched yet.

Virtualbox F-12, like the physical BIOS boot choice F-key, allows boot choices of floppy, CD, or any of the virtual disks on the guest, but not the partitions on the disks. To get to the desired partition, you have to let the boot loader on the disk boot first. This boot loader is similar to the text list Windows provides when , as an example, you install XP then 7, and you get a choice of which OS to run for 30 seconds. Virtualbox F-12 is not the key to cause this to happen.

To confirm your setup so further help can be given, find the guest's .vbox file, zip it, and post the zip file.