From Pop_OS, if you launch the "disks" program, can you see the other drive there, and the NTFS windows partition on it?
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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yes, there's an NTFS partition. Heres a screenshot:
Ah I think Windows does this "helpful" thing where it installs its bootloader into the ESP of any drive if it's already present rather than the drive you explicitly told it to install onto.
You didn't have anything in it yet, right? Unplug all other drives and then re-install Windows onto the drive. It should work as expected after that.
IIRC Pop!_OS sets the systemd-boot timeout super short; you have to hold a key after the firmware is done or something to get to it reliably or simply increase the timeout (1s is enough, I have it set to that on my systems). systemd-boot should give you the option to boot any windows installation though, it can auto-detect them.
thank you for the suggestion! i ended up uninstalling pop and windows then doing windows first but i appreciate the suggestion
Well it's there at least. Hmm. I don't know a whole lot about windows but you can certainly get back to those boot options you saw before by pressing shift while booting, which will open the GRUB options. I'd give the windows boot manager another shot from there.
If that ends up working you can change the grub settings to wait for input instead of automatically booting pop. If that doesn't work then something is probably wrong with windows and I would just try reinstalling since it sounds like you don't have anything on there yet.
thank you i will try.
at this point i am considering uninstalling Pop and getting win10 first because linux actually has sensible ways to dual boot even on the same drive. that's probably what i'll have to do.
I swore off dual booting a couple years ago, but I do recall the order in which I installed the OS' did matter. So it's worth a shot.
i have done that successfully at the cost of my sleep schedule lmao.
do i need to install the grub bootloader? because no matter what i do holding shift doesn't do anything. i am on windows reinstall number 3 now
Apparently I'm wrong and Pop_Os uses systemD-boot not GRUB, which is surprising to me because unless things have changed I've always thought of systemD-boot as being underpowered for a lot of use cases.
If I'm reading the wiki correctly here, I think it's saying systemd-boot cannot launch windows because it's on another drive? https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd-boot#Boot_from_another_disk
But on the other hand it's interesting that it's able to "see" the windows partition so I might be completely wrong.
this is indeed, pretty damn weird. I'm going to go with uninstalling pop os, and getting windows first on the smaller drive, then getting either KDE Neon or Linux Mint on the bigger one. kinda sucks, i wish i couldve just installed but it doesn't seem like there is anything i can do. thank you so much for the help, comrade. 
FYI: Pop!_OS 22.04 uses systemd-boot, not GRUB.
I use rEFInd, which auto-detects my Windows boot partition. Though I had the Windows installation before the Linux one.
Systemd-boot should be able to detect a bootable Windows too. Those 3 boot options you saw once was systemd. Try to set that up as preferred boot manager in your BIOS/UEFI and you're set.
Try updating grub. If windows pops up as well as pop os you are golden.
General rule of dual booting from the same drive: install windows first, then Linux.
There is a niffty Boot manager called Refined. This is what I use even though I installed Windows after Linux and had many kernel panics, but it does the job well since it scans your boot drive every time you Power on your machine. Here is a link. Just download the CD-ROM version, put it in ventoy, boot from it, and the rest is easy. You already are a linux user, you can figure it out.
I also advise you to disable Windows updates if you can, and I mean all updates, because they can mess the boot order. If you use Windows to play games and games only.
Edit: You can also install it from your distro package manager if you can access your system.
that is exclusively how i use it, thanks for the tip
No problem, just returning the good of the community. Tell me if it worked out.
I'm no expert, but if you're installing both from scratch, my understanding is it's easier to install Windows first.
This will help: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dual_boot_with_Windows
Applies to PopOS the same way, except for installation steps involving pacman. I'd revommend going with systemd-boot instead of grub, not sure what Pop ships.