Simple Hardware Switch For OS Dualbooting, Thanks To RP2040

Dualbooting your personal computer can be a chore, the a lot more switching amongst OSes you have to do – which is why virtualization or acquiring different computers are the go-to for a lot of. Failing that, we have no selection but to clean over our dualbooting experience with numerous workarounds and helpers. [William Somsky] shares a person such helper resource with us – an stylish product made with a RP2040-sporting TinyPICO board and a a few-way rocker switch, directing GRUB to boot into both Home windows or Linux quickly, or leave us with the usual boot menu. This way, you can just flip the change, strike “reboot” and wander absent, coming again to your Pc booted into OS of your selection, instead of timing your existence just so that you can catch the boot menu on time.

All you need to have to do is to solder a rocker change to your RP2040 board of option, then flash the RP2040 with code that detects the condition of the change, and generates a mass storage product internet hosting a file location a Grub variable to both a single of the , 1 or 2. [William] describes his journey, combating mysterious caching troubles, but tells us he received it doing work in the stop. Unfortunately, [William] hasn’t shared the RP2040-side code with us, but he has at minimum place the Grub’s personalized.cfg file in the ‘Files’ section of the Hackaday.io challenge.

Readily obtainable microcontrollers with mass storage features confident enable make these kinds of hacks simple – earlier, we’ve viewed dualboot switching like this carried out by modifying assembly code of the MBR. Dualbooting is a hacker’s ceremony of passage, and specified OSes of late can make it more challenging than other ones. Even if you don’t want to dualboot your Computer system, nonetheless, you guaranteed can dualboot an Arduino!