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fdisk HDD and grub installI have an HP Elite X2 and the OS on the ssd is windows 11. I have a external hdd with Kali Linux installed and it works fine on other laptops. But on this one it won't boot automatically.

If I go to boot menu in the BIOS and select the hdd manually it still just beeps and sends me back to the BIOS settings. But below the 2 hard drives there was an option boot from file and in that I can select the HDD partition and select GRUB and it boots just fine.

I should also mention I have stuff on this HDD and I have manually partitioned the Kali Linux installation below the stuff I already have.

In there could it be because my OS is below the other partition if so how can I move it without losing data?

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  • So kali won't recognize my wifi adapter now that I boot from file is it related to this is it a completely different issue but the first time I installed kali and ran from the hdd I worked perfectly fine but suddenly today it just won't work
    – skeleg
    Commented Jul 8 at 9:46

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If I go to boot Menu in the bios and select the hdd manually it still just beeps and sends me back to the bios settings. But below the 2 hard drives there was an option boot from file and in that I can select the hdd partition and select grub and it boots just fine.

At the end of the Kali install process, when the bootloader was installed to the HDD, you should have selected the option to treat the HDD as a removable media.

Kali installation process - "Install the GRUB boot loader" step

I'm guessing that by first selecting the Enter device manually option, the next screen would have offered the removable media option, probably as a checkbox or similar.

That would have caused the installer to write the UEFI bootloader onto the ESP partition as /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.efi (as seen from the installed Kali). That is the removable media/fallback bootloader path, which the UEFI firmware knows to look for without a specific NVRAM boot variable.

You can fix that mistake by booting into Kali, verifying that the /boot/efi is the ESP partition on the external HDD, and then running:

sudo grub-install --removable

After that, the UEFI firmware should recognize the external HDD as bootable in UEFI mode without needing to use the Boot from File option.

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  • hey so i tried that and i assume i have to fdisk to the uefi partition before the grub install command and when i do it says it created 4 partitions with size totaling to 1GB and the uefi partition is 512MB so if i write that where will it be pulling that space from can i delete this uefi partition entirely and create a new one in the HDD and install grub with this command there
    – skeleg
    Commented Jul 10 at 19:39

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