Boot hidden internal SDD

[Midas]

I'm faced with a Samsung laptop equipped with a SSD drive and an optical drive, both clearly available from the BIOS as startup devices.

Moreover, Linux (Mint) liveCD pre-boot hardware detection shows there's a third smaller SSD (listed as disk 2, i.e., before the disk 3 main drive) -- which once the OS boots also shows up as '/dev/sdb'...

I wanted to setup Linux to this drive and I'm wondering if there's a way to use Ventoy to boot it, since I have no option to do that via BIOS (without presumably having to change it into UEFI mode).

My Linux-foo is a bit weak here, so any help appreciated.

[Midas]

I went ahead and installed Mint anyway to '/dev/sdb1'. Everything went according to the script and it finished successfully as much as I'm able to tell; only, when asked where to place the bootloader I got puzzled and in a hurry decided to place it in '/dev/sdb' -- which means the disk and not the partition to me...

Then I rebooted and as expected, I couldn't boot the new system.

Next, I looked around the net and tried to follow something found at StackExchange (https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/330852).  After exiting Ventoy to the shell by pressing "c", I was able to find the grub folder at '(hd1,msdos1)/boot/grub' and then typed the remaining commands; there was a quick flash after entering the last normal and the screen just went blank. Dead end, it seems.

I'll just keep looking...

[Midas]

Couldn't solve this and the laptop is now gone. In the end, I resorted to leaving the ISO in place and setting app persistence. Bummer!