15 R3, choose Boot device from two SSDs?

 

Well, I DID format my Toshiba drive of identical size and only slightly different board revision, and it won't show any options for an installed hard drive than the one labeled Hard Drive, which is ONLY the 256GB Toshiba drive my system came with. Speaking of which, I have an AW 15R3, spec'd as follows:

• Core i7 7700HQ

• 16GBs RAM

• 6GB NVIDIA GTX1060

• 256GB NVMe in slot 3 (default SSD slot)

• 256GB NVMe in slot 2 (new)

• 1TB SATA drive in the default HDD 2.5" slot)

I have Pop_OS 20.04 installed on the Slot 3 drive. I used to have a 128GB 2260 (I think, it's shorter than standard and has two keys, but it works) SSD in Slot 2 which I run Windows 10 from, but I'm planning on cloning it to the new 256GB drive.

As an aside, the dual-booting I do between Pop and Windows is a tad kludgy. I restart, push F12 to get the boot menu, enter the BIOS, restart, do F12 again, select the Windows drive, and go. If the drive appears the first time I enter the boot menu and run it, it starts with bad errors, but it will start normally if I cold boot. It occurred to me that I should just shutdown then restart, and that seems to work, but it's supremely annoying... but I digress...

Now it comes around to that one option in the boot menu:

Hard Drive

That's it. I have secure boot turned off and legacy boot options enabled, but the BIOS, which is current, doesn't have ANY options for pretty much anything interesting. I've even installed a clean install of Pop 20.04 on the new drive, and I can't boot to it and I at Grub, so I'm not sure how to modify the settings for multi-boot options.

So, after all that I ask, is the 15R3, or the OP's 17R4 for that matter, even capable of dual-booting from two NVMe drives? Isn't most of this stuff already sorted and should have been handled mostly automatically? I can see the drive in Disks and mount it without issue, but the computer itself doesn't see it as a valid boot option.

There's gotta be a BIOS update or something.