mjhjmtu

I'm having a problem about how I boot to Linux. I tried and successfully boot if there is only one drive and one ESP. but my goal is to have two different drives with their own ESP. the first drive have Windows with its own ESP, and the second drive would be for Linux with its own ESP.

I'm doing this so that these drives would be independently boot even if the absence of the other drive.

What I did is I removed the first drive containing the windows and installed the Linux on the second drive. If the first drive isn't connected Linux boots perfectly.

Now my problem is if both of the drives are connected and when I boot to Linux it will tell me no init found try init=bootargs, but the drive with Windows boots perfectly fine.

Can someone please give me insights or help because I really need help please? Thank you in advance!

The no init found message tells me that the Linux kernel has already started up, but it fails to find /sbin/initon the root filesystem, possibly because it's looking at the wrong place.

Find out how your Linux bootloader settings identify the root filesystem. Typically it's a root= option for the Linux kernel.

If the root filesystem is identified as /dev/sdaN (where N is a number), then it specifies the Nth partition on whichever disk is detected first by the drivers included in your initramfs/initrd file. When you have only the Linux drive connected, this assumption is correct and your system boots fine. But when both disks are connected, your Windows disk is detected first and the root=/dev/sdaN option effectively points to the wrong disk.

The best way to fix this would be to specify your root filesystem in a way that is not dependent of disk detection order.

While in Linux, run blkid as root. It will list each disk partition it can see, and all identifiers for them. Find the line matching the partition containing your root filesystem: it should have an UUID=<a long hexadecimal string> value listed. It may or may not also have a LABEL=<a short name>. There will also be a PARTUUID and possibly a PARTLABEL listed; ignore them.

In most Linux distributions, you can change the root=/dev/sdaN option to the form root=UUID=<the long hexadecimal string form blkid>. This way your root filesystem will be explicitly identified by the unique filesystem UUID and not by its detection order.

Since you did not specify the name and version of your Linux distribution, I cannot tell you exactly where you should make this modification, as the location of bootloader configuration varies somewhat in different Linux distributions. But on modern distributions, /etc/default/grub might be a good guess. After modifying /etc/default/grub, you'll usually have to run some command to update the actual bootloader: it might be update-grub or grub-mkconfig or something similar.