Dual Boot Help

[Ahajha]

I have an oldish laptop (HP Envy m6 1125dx, i5 3210m, 256 GB SSD) that I have dual booted with Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (which I am loving over 17.10, I must say). My issue comes not from how to dual boot it, as it's already set up, rather it's HOW I have it set up. When I initially set it up, GRUB2 took over as my boot manager (as I expected), then a while later Windows took over and stopped showing GRUB2 at all. I found a ghetto fix on the interwebz somewhere that basically had me replace the windows boot file with the grub boot file, so the system boots to grub instead of windows (I can still get to windows, it's a bit of a process though).

 

Here's what I would LIKE to be the case: Computer boots straight to GRUB2 without any shenanigans (replacing the windows file), then I can select Windows or Ubuntu. The wall I keep running into is that my laptop for some reason cannot change the boot order of things, it ALWAYS boots to that exact file, there's no option in the BIOS, and efibootmgr -o just ends up getting wiped on restart. I'm not sure what information is needed, so just ask and ye shall receive. I have some knowledge of how partitions work, and I think it might have something to do with the laptop looking at an mbr, and windows overwriting that, but I don't really know if that makes any sense.

[Electronics Wizardy]

what if you reinstall grub?

 

Windows will reinstall the boot loader and do that everytime there is a big update.

[Ahajha]

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

what if you reinstall grub?

 

Windows will reinstall the boot loader and do that everytime there is a big update.

I haven't thought to reinstall grub. Should I just do that from within Ubuntu, or should I do it from a live USB?

[Fleetscut]

what boot order are you trying to change? The order that the options show up on grub? You can change that (and other things) from the grub.cfg

[Ahajha]

15 hours ago, Fleetscut said:

what boot order are you trying to change? The order that the options show up on grub? You can change that (and other things) from the grub.cfg

It's not a matter of changing grub (Also, I had read online that it wasn't the best idea to change grub.cfg directly), rather I want to change the boot order of the whole system. Right now it defaults to launch "Windows", which I replaced with Grub. I can change what type of device it boots to from the BIOS, but not where exactly it boots from. For example, I can't tell it to boot directly to Ubuntu or Windows, it just always boots to "Windows".

[Fleetscut]

i think there is some confusion here. grub is a bootloader. It is what performs the task of choosing which operating system to boot into. You cant replace "Windows" with grub, you replace the windows bootloader. The windows bootloader will only boot to windows, it does not support any other OS, grub is capable of booting into most OSes.

 

You have a few options here,

 

Stick with one boot loader which is grub. If you have only one disk for your operating systems then this is your only option. On boot you choose which operating system you want to start.

 

If you have more than one disk then you can have a separate boot loader on each. You can leave the windows boot loader on the disk with windows and put grub on the disk with ubuntu. This way you will always need to change the order of the boot drive to choose which os you go into.

[Ahajha]

3 hours ago, Fleetscut said:

i think there is some confusion here. grub is a bootloader. It is what performs the task of choosing which operating system to boot into. You cant replace "Windows" with grub, you replace the windows bootloader. The windows bootloader will only boot to windows, it does not support any other OS, grub is capable of booting into most OSes.

 

You have a few options here,

 

Stick with one boot loader which is grub. If you have only one disk for your operating systems then this is your only option. On boot you choose which operating system you want to start.

 

If you have more than one disk then you can have a separate boot loader on each. You can leave the windows boot loader on the disk with windows and put grub on the disk with ubuntu. This way you will always need to change the order of the boot drive to choose which os you go into.

Since my system is a laptop, it has one drive. Does this mean my system can have only one bootloader? Also, how would I go about making grub the bootloader for that drive? Right now, I've replaced /boot/efi/EFI/Microsoft/bootmgfw.efi with the grub efi file (I think shimx64.efi) (this is what I was referring to when I said I replaced the windows boot file with the grub boot file), and while that's working, it's not the solution I've wanted.

[Fleetscut]

you will need to boot into a live usb, mount the boot partition to /boot, and then run grub-install. This should properly create the boot partition of the disk and place in all the needed grub files. Then you regenerate your grub config and you should be done. Make sure you have the os-prober package installed otherwise grub might not find windows. arch wiki has tons of info https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB