Hi @b9junkers, I also have a Dell. It is a Laptop Latitude E6440. I also have 2 disks. One HDD that has Windows 10 on it and one SDD with 4 Linux Distros on it.
- Please note: My solution was for only one disk connected at a time.
- Leaving my answer to help with discussion on MBR, GPT, and UEFI
The window 10 disk is a MBR formatted disk and uses Legacy support.
The Linux SSD disk is formatted as GPT and uses UEFI. On the Linux disk I have Ubuntu, Zorin, Mint Xfce, and Xubuntu installed. Doing some research I ran across this web page;
https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php?title=Some_basics_of_MBR_v/s_GPT_and_BIOS_v/s_UEFI
In this page it said,-----> "Usually, MBR and BIOS (MBR + BIOS), and GPT and UEFI (GPT + UEFI) go hand in hand. This is compulsory for some systems (eg Windows), while optional for others (eg Linux). "
I’m sorry for all this detail, but wanted to give you some background information.
Here is a solution that worked for me, but might not be what you were looking for.
For my Linux SSD, I did the following;
- Formatted the SSD to GPT to make sure it was not in MBR format.
- Then I went into BIOS to switch rom to use UEFI instead of Latency. (3 different places)
- I used my Mint Cinnamon system to d/l the different ISO’s and to create the USB boot drive. Cinnamon has an option on the pull down (or right click) menu to create the USB drives w/o d/l’ing any other software.
- During the install of each Distro, I selected “Something Else” to place the “/” partition and to re-use (except 1st install) /home and swap.
You can see the different disk layouts at Three Distro SSD here on this forum.
The bad news.
When I want to boot the disk with Windows and MBR, I have to go back into BIOS and turn off UEFI.
When I want to boot Linux with UEFI, I again have to go into BIOS and turn UEFI back on.
Maybe good news.
I know there are some Linux Distro out there that support MBR type disks or maybe there is a way to force Ubuntu to install on a MBR disk. If you can get the Distro to install on a MBR format disk, then you would not have to change the BIOS setting back and forth. My BIOS has an option to support Legacy (MBR ?), but I could not get that to work.