Install Kali on 2nd HDD; Dual boot via BIOS rather than GRUB boot menu?

Hey Guys,



Quick question - my laptop has two hard drives, a big SSD I have Windows 8.1 installed on and a redundant mSATA 14GB soldered HDD which is used as cache if you don't have an SSD.

I've cleared the mSATA drive and would like to install Kali on it in a "portable" sort of what - without touching my windows partition.

Am I correct in assuming I could install Kali on it as a single drive and then select which drive to boot into using the BIOS boot order rather than fiddling with either boot loaders?

Therefore having two independent hard drives with two independent boot menus and operating systems.


Advice appreciated.



Best,
Ollie

Quick bump to give this a second wind - if nothing I'll just give up and stick it on a USB - not interested in messing with boot loaders on a work machine.

I don't see why this wouldn't be possible. After all if you can boot from a USB in the first place then you shouldn't have an issue booting from a second HDD. I plan on doing the same thing. I have a 1tb HDD with windows and a 32gb SSD soldered. (Alienware laptop) that I plan on putting Kali on.

I have 2 hdd: 1Tb and 320gb and in the 1Tb drive I have kali and 4 other OS (XP, Win7, Debian Testing and Debian Sid) and the 320Gb I have winXP, win7, Debian wheezy and Debian testing.

Once you boot, it reads the boot loader (GRUB) from sda, sdb, etc. depending on your hardware sata cables (Drive 0, 1 etc) or the ssd0, ssd1, etc.

No problem. this is linux.

During the install it will ask where to put the boot loader, just select sdb or whatever the drive you're installing to is.

I know this is necro-posting but did anyone ever get this working? I am trying to do the same with my machine and after installing Kali on the second hdd it boots and then goes to a black screen with just a cursor blinking at the top left with no options/typing available. Any ideas on this?


Thanks,
Laggy