Can you install Debian direct from your main SSD?

Yes, it is possible. You can use the Windows Partition Manager to shrink the Windows partition to create at least 40GB for your Debian partition, which you can leave unformatted. Also create two 2GB FAT32 partitions. Then download the Debian non-free installation CD and mount it using windows explorer. Show hidden files, then copy all the files to the 2 FAT32 partitions.

Install Grub2Win and add a boot entry, which is a chainloader to the boot/EFI/bootx64.efi file on one of FAT32 partitions.

Boot to that entry. During installation, use the Shell prompt menu entry then run “ls /dev/sda*” to see all the available partitions, then run “mount -t vfat /dev/sda4 /cdrom” (as an example). You might have to guess which partition number it is (sdaN). Once it is mounted you can run “ls /cdrom” to check that it is the Debian install media. After that, the installation should succeed. During partitioning, choose the 40GB unformatted free space and format as EXT4 with mount point “/”. A swap drive is unnecessary, since you can use swapfiles anyway.

Note that you still need to install Grub 2 as part of the Debian installation to automatically setup the Kernel parameters and initial RAM disk etc.

Also note that on some machines, you may need to enter the BIOS to configure the EFI boot priorities to ensure it boots to the correct EFI boot partition.

Furthermore after booting, you may need to edit /etc/apt/sources.list to comment out the CDROM entries and add the default Debian Apt repositories. So it may be better to use the normal Debian ISO instead of the non-free ISO after all.

Type the following data into sources.list for bullseye:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main contrib non-free
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-updates main contrib non-free
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-backports main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ bullseye-security main contrib non-free


Then run “apt install tasksel && tasksel install desktop kde-desktop” if you would like to install KDE. (Note that you will need to be logged in as root to do the above steps).