Can't boot windows with refind - diferent disks

[Joao Vale]

So i had a laptop with windows 10 installed on my hdd and decided to install pop-os with refind boot on sdd. The problem is on refind menu, windows doesn't show up. I have already tried many ways to solve this but i think the problem is because refind is not in same disk as windows. Can someone help to figure it out?

[Roderick W. Smith]

rEFInd should scan all the disks to which the EFI has access. Absent other information, the explanation that springs to my mind is that Windows may be installed in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode. By default, on a UEFI PC, rEFInd will not scan for BIOS-mode boot loaders. See here for information on how to determine your boot mode:

https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/bootmode.html

If I'm right, then you can edit refind.conf to fix the problem, in either of two ways:

• Uncomment the scanfor line and ensure that hdbios is among the options. The resulting menu should show one boot option for each of your disks. One of those should boot Windows, and you can hide any unwanted extra icon(s) by hitting the Delete or minus (-) key. In some cases you may also need to uncomment the uefi_deep_legacy_scan line, but I recommend trying this only if it doesn't work without that option.
• In Linux, type sudo efibootmgr -v to identify your boot options. In most cases, you'll see one BIOS-mode boot option for each disk, in addition to your EFI-mode boot options. You can then create a manual boot stanza that refers to the disk that holds Windows via the firmware_bootnum option. This has the advantage that you can name it whatever you like, but it may take a little longer to boot than the previous option.

If I'm wrong and there's some other cause, then a manual boot stanza will probably also work. You could either create one that references the Windows boot loader file directly or do something like just described (with firmware_bootnum, but referring to the EFI loader rather than the disk device). It would be better to figure out why rEFInd is not detecting Windows, though. rEFInd should have no problem detecting an EFI-mode Windows boot loader, so if it's not doing that, something is wrong. This could be filesystem damage, a disk that's inaccessible to the EFI (but that would probably render Windows completely unbootable, period), a Windows boot loader installed in a non-standard location, or something that hasn't occurred to me.