Windows or Mint Borking Grub

[Garak]

Okay, gentlemen, this happened to me today, despite the fact that I haven't entered my Windows partition in over a month. So, it doesn't make a lot of sense to blame Windows for this (try as I might). Somewhere, Mint must have had something silly going on, and I do shake my head at the developers sometimes. I can never discount the ability of Windows to wreck a system. I also have zero faith in the Mint people's understanding of grub, secure boot, or encryption, and this is the third elementary error I've caught over the past many months that they've let through.

Basically, when I restarted today, it went straight to Windows. My grub is set to default to Mint if I let it sit there, not to Windows. Well, no grub menu, no nothing, straight to Windows. In the BIOS, all the devices were still there, and nothing reverted with respect to secure boot; legacy boot was still enabled.

I don't know if this will help people who are having Windows 10 issues with dual boot. If a partition happens to be ruined, my solution is useless. If the booting is the only issue, this should work, and I'd ask our resident experts to vet my work here.

First, you're going to have to get into Mint (or whatever) manually by bringing up the boot screen, since it's going to want to go into stupid Windows immediately, which won't help one iota. From there, get yourself into a command line.

Code:
sudo update-grub

That may not be necessary, but I'd make sure that's done at first, just to be sure.

Code:
sudo efibootmgr

If it's showing the Windows boot manager at hex 0000, that is going to be your problem; at least it was for me.

Code:
sudo efibootmgr -b 0000 -B

If the Windows boot manager is a different hex number, substitute that for the 0000. Upon reboot, my grub menu was back in order, and it wasn't trying to fling me straight into Windows. Hopefully, this remains persistent, or it's back to the drawing board.

 

[Garak]

Oh, and it is a Mint SNAFU. Checking the logs, there was a grub-efi-amd64-bin update that clearly needs some work. So, let's get this straight here. The Mint people recently broke secure boot. Now, their latest boot related update kicks everyone to Windows without warning. That's one heck of a brilliant software strategy.

 

[mpersell]

I've been wrestling similar issues with grub2 on Fedora. Haven't booted Windows 10 or made any changes on the bios but straight to Windows lately unless I interrupt with the bios level boot order.

 

[Garak]

I don't know if I should even bother with a bug report. All the Mint people will do is a bunch of hand waving and deflection as per usual. Why play around with releasing an efi update when the OS doesn't support secure boot in the first place? Why update a package that isn't broken? The Mint people are clearly flummoxed by the procedure for booting a computer, and really need to keep their mitts off as best as they possibly can.

Unfortunately, things are more complicated than they used to be in the older days of grub. All that means is they need to exhibit much more caution when playing around. Maybe the Mint people can really do the job correctly and simply redirect the Mint webpage to the Microsoft home page. That's essentially what they've done in their boot sequence.

 

[JeepWJ19]

Backup all your files on windows, delete the windows partition and just install a VM of Windows. Simple solution and from what it seems since you only get on windows every once in a while I wouldn't bother having a whole partition dedicated to it unless you absolutely need it. I ended up doing this with my laptop

 

[55Test]

I've got 2 systems dualbooting Windows 10 and Linux, my main desktop PC has Win 10 and Zorin OS and my little Lenovo mini laptop has Win 10 and Mint 17. Linux installed easily onto both of them but after a few reboots and a couple mandatory updates from M$, Grub was overwritten or something so I couldn't select to boot into Linux if I chose to. The partitions are there and even if I press F9 to select a bootable partition and pick the partition with my Linux install, both systems still boot straight into Windows.

 

[Garak]

Heck, I have so little to backup on Windows.

The real problem here is I can't even blame this problem on Windows in the first place.

55Test: You might have to boot through a Live DVD. Do you have legacy boot enabled, too? That will almost certainly be necessary. Then, you can get into a shell and check some things out. Your problem may be a little more involved, then, unfortunately.

 

[eljefino]

Secure boot exists in the first place to cover for insecure Windows. So you can still blame this snafu on Windows.

I went through moderate hoops bypassing it for my dual-boot machine. Seems the reverse-engineering is a challenge for the linux gang.

 

[Garak]

Some distros are secure boot approved, such as Ubuntu. My first Mint install on this machine worked fine, since Mint had convinced secure boot it was Ubuntu. The subsequent version didn't work, though. That's when the hand waving began with my bug report.

 

[simple_gifts]

+1 for virtualizing the Windows

Some OSes have a good history of trying to prevent users from utilizing their machines as they wish. Others play nicely in the sandbox.

Virtualbox for the ease of implementation; KVM for the mature users.

 

[Garak]

True, but it's still a silly mess when a dual boot is the path to least resistance. The average person buys a computer with Windows installed on it already. Even I do that. So, I grab whatever LiveDVD that suits my fancy and do an install. If I want to play a couple games on Windows, like I decided to do with my last box, I'll leave Windows alongside. Other times, I just overwrote the whole drive. My "need" for Windows simply doesn't exist. I play a couple old games. If things get too annoying, I'm not virtualizing anything. It's not worth the hassle. I'll just eliminate the Windows partition altogether.

Ironically, to use my burner or printer, I make sure I'm in Linux.

 

[bunnspecial]

For the rare occasion I use Windows, I just keep an XP x64 VM at the ready in VMWare. I'll likely install 7 at some point-for the time being XP does everything I need and since I turn off network access in VMware I'm not too concerned about lack of security(nothing I do in it requires internet access).

I hate to plug one particular major computer manufacturer, but then I am a fan boy. The nice thing is that if you want to dual boot Windows and their own version of Unix, the computer can do so without the use of a boot loader. Of course, there is the caveat that if you want to run Linux you do need a boot loader like rEFInd.