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Seven deadly sins

Q I just converted a laptop with Windows 7 to Linux Mint 19.2 to bring new life to it. In the process I substituted the old internal HDD with a new SSD and installed Linux as the only OS of the disk. I then inserted the old Windows 7 disk into a USB external box to occasionally run applications not available on Linux. Basically I need the official iTunes application to manage paid songs downloaded for my iPhone.

I tried sudo update-grub, but it’s not enough - the external disk never appears in the Grub menu at startup. Note that the Windows 7 OS on the HDD is fully functional (I can boot it if I change the boot priority from BIOS). Also, if I run Mint, the USB HDD NTFS filesystem is correctly mounted.

Do you have some hints to make the external USB HDD dual boot with grub? Thanks a lot in advance. Keep going with your awesome mag.

Alberto Caielli, Italy

A I’m not entirely sure, but I think that the update-grub command these days should see your USB drive, so long as it’s mounted and the os-prober package is installed. If not then you can try and manually create an entry for the Windows drive in /etc/grub.d, but this can turn into a laborious process. Each entry in here will generate a stanza in /boot/grub/grub.cfg when update-grub is run. So have a look at that file to see (vaguely) what you’re aiming for.