Trouble dual-booting elementaryOS with Windows 10.

[citromaind]

Seems that this isn't as straight forward as the internet makes it.

First things first, some key things about the laptop:

• 2 physical hard disks, one is a 250GB SSD and the other is a 300GB HDD,
• Windows 10 was installed first on the SSD and the HDD was used as a storage drive for Windows,
• Secure boot was enabled, but read the post below for an explanation.

I grabbed a copy of elementaryOS from their website and used Universal USB Installer to make the flash drive. That went smoothly, so I booted into the pendrive straight away without changing anything in the BIOS.

Installation goes as expected, but then I hit one of the first "bumps" of the install:

1. When it lets you choose the partitions and drives to install to, it only let me choose the 300GB HDD storage drive. Didn't think much, allocated it some space and continued.
2. When the installer asks for permission to install some drivers and these so called proprietary drivers. I checked that, but then it asked me to create a Secure Boot password. Didn't think much, made that.

Everything after that went swimmingly! The OS was installed and it asked for a reboot. The system rebooted and I removed the pendrive from my laptop. The computer booted straight to elementaryOS and asked me to log in. When I tried to log in, it would just give me a black screen and straight back to the login screen. I couldn't even CTRL+ALT+F3 or whatever the command is, to get to the command line and edit the Xauthority file. No way to reboot the computer either, so I do a hard reboot via the power button. Upon doing that, I got something like this on my screen (see the pic below).

Not knowing what to do or how to get out of it, since it did that at every restart, I hard restarted it again and mashed ESC to get to the boot sequence selector and selected Windows Boot Manager. It booted Windows just fine and whenever I start or restart my computer after Windows is loaded, the GRUB menu shows up as intended, and let's me choose elementary again, but the result is the same. Keep in mind, that secure boot is still enabled.

Any ideas on what could be the fix? How would I go about uninstalling Linux and GRUB and just going back to Windows and trying again? What things do I change, to make it work? 

Sorry for the long wall of text, running out of ideas here. :(

[Dutch_Master]

Boot into Win-10 then re-install the Win-OS bootloader (see Google on what command to use and how to issue it, being a Linux guy I haven't got the foggiest idea ). That removes Grub from the MBR/UEFI partition.

 

Try again

[citromaind]

2 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

Boot into Win-10 then re-install the Win-OS bootloader (see Google on what command to use and how to issue it, being a Linux guy I haven't got the foggiest idea ). That removes Grub from the MBR/UEFI partition.

 

Try again

Shouldn't I delete the Linux partitions first? Because I just checked disk manager and I'm confused looking at it now. So the C : Drive is my Windows install. D : drive would be the 300GB storage drive. I put down 100gb for elementary. Which partitions do I delete? Just the 92.87GB one? What about that E: drive? Never had that and it appeared after I installed Linux. Why do I have 2 OEM Partition Partitions both on the C : drive and one EFI System partition on drive C : and another on drive D : ? What the hell is happening here lol

[Dutch_Master]

No, don't delete any partition just yet. First, fix the boot manager issue, then move on.

[jdfthetech]

1 hour ago, Dutch_Master said:

No, don't delete any partition just yet. First, fix the boot manager issue, then move on.

this is the correct answer.  fix your bootloader first.

 

the issue you have is secure boot.  This can be fixed in the bootloader but is relatively complicated.

This article should be helpful:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Secure_Boot

[citromaind]

13 hours ago, jdfthetech said:

this is the correct answer.  fix your bootloader first.

 

the issue you have is secure boot.  This can be fixed in the bootloader but is relatively complicated.

This article should be helpful:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Secure_Boot

Day 2, I disabled secure boot and managed to get into linux, but every time I restart the system or shut it down after booting linux, it still gives me that GRUB error. Any ideas?

Either way, I want to move linux from the 300GB HDD to my SSD, because I think the hard drive might explode if I use it for a operating system. Can I just physically remove the HDD, install linux on top of Windows on my SSD, plug the HDD back in and through Windows clean out the HDD partitions of the old Linux install?

[Dutch_Master]

No, not exactly. From looking at your partition table, your EOM has created 2 recovery partitions on the SSD. Should you want to install Linux on the SSD one needs to be removed/replaced with an extended partition, as an MBR only supports 4 primary partitions. It's virtually impossible to change a primary partition to an extended one from within Win-OS, so you really need a Linux Live CD to work from. I'd also suggest a different partitioning scheme for your system, which is easier to accomplish from a Live CD environment. On the SSD: a 512MB (E)UFI FAT partition for booting, then divide the remaining space between NTFS (for Win-10) and ext4 for Linux. On the HDD: 2 NTFS partitions copied from the SSD (before re-partitioning that) for the Win-10 recovery system and have the remainder of the disk for data (to make sure Win-OS can understand it, it should be NTFS, although Linux file systems are more secure. IIRC there are some Open Source drivers for Win-OS that make the translation from a Linux FS to Win-OS, but these are fairly experimental by default as M$ does NOT condone, let alone support this)

 

So the first thing you need to do is obtain a Linux Live-CD, like Knoppix, put that on bootable media and boot your machine from it. Most Linux Live-CD's boot into a GUI, but not everyone. Next, clean out your D disk by moving any data on it to a secure location, e.i. an external hard-drive. Next, create both recovery partitions on the newly formatted D disk and copy their contents over (one at a time). When done, remove(delete) the recovery partitions from the SSD, then move the UFI partition the the beginning of the SSD, followed by the Win-OS partition. Both will take time to shift as data needs to be copied, etc. By this stage you should have fixed the MBR so Grub is no longer there (but if you followed my previous advise, that should already be the case). To test if the whole meddling around has worked, reboot into Win-OS. If that works, re-install Linux, if not, re-install Win-OS first.

[jdfthetech]

Dutch Master has good advice here and not much I could add.

One thing I would add, is the EFI partition is very finicky and expects very specific entries as well as has particular limits.  I would highly recommend you read the wiki article I posted and all links within to understand the limits of EFI.

That said, you really don't want to hose your windows partitions just to install linux, so I'd suggest doing a windows restore to get the boot loader all corrected.  Once that's done, I'd suggest doing a linux install in a virtual machine before committing it to a windows dual boot system.

there are a lot of sites out there that portray installing linux as easy as 1-2-3 but there are hardware and system limitations that must be considered.  Don't give up, but just research a bit.

If you have questions about good resources feel free to reach out.