Arch Linux

sagar

Member

Registered: 2026-01-24

Posts: 1

my archis not booting in external ssd

Hi everyone, I’m stuck with an external-SSD boot issue and could use some guidance.

I’m running a laptop with AMI UEFI firmware (BIOS F.07, 2025). Secure Boot is disabled and the system is set to pure UEFI mode.

My internal NVMe drive has Windows and Kali installed and boots fine. I installed Arch Linux with Hyprland on an external USB SSD. The installation completes without errors.

The problem is that the system refuses to boot Arch from the external SSD.

What happens:

On every boot, the firmware falls back to the internal NVMe and loads Kali’s GRUB.

Even when I explicitly select “Arch” or the external device from the boot menu, it still ends up booting the internal disk.

Using efibootmgr, I only see Windows and Kali entries. An Arch entry only appears if I install GRUB to the internal EFI, which I want to avoid.

There is a “USB Drive (UEFI)” entry, but it gets skipped as long as the internal NVMe has a valid bootloader.

What I’ve already verified:

Secure Boot is disabled and the platform is in setup mode (mokutil --sb-state).

The external SSD is detected correctly (lsblk shows it as sda).

The external SSD has a valid EFI partition and contains EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI.

I’ve tried installing GRUB both in removable mode and with a named EFI entry pointing to the external disk.

At this point, it feels like the firmware is simply ignoring external USB EFI boot entries and silently falling back to the internal NVMe whenever it finds a valid bootloader there.

Has anyone dealt with similar AMI UEFI behavior? Is there a reliable workaround for booting Linux from an external SSD on systems like this, without touching the internal EFI?

Any help or confirmation would be appreciated.

jonno2002

Member

Registered: 2016-11-21

Posts: 850

Re: my archis not booting in external ssd

first thing i would try is booting the external ssd off another pc/laptop and if the ssd can be removed from the caddy (if its even that type and not a usb stick ssd) i would try putting that into a pc/laptop and see if it boots
if it doesnt then you know the problem isnt to do with it being external and then start checking uuid's in fstab/grub and/or re-install grub again in case you made a mistake somewhere.