Boot options not coming up for Linux when starting PC

[Fasauceome]

TL,DR: How do I either let the Windows boot loader offer me the chance to select Ubuntu, or force Ubuntu to be the primary boot option in BIOS?

 

Just installed Ubuntu 20.04 to finally dual-boot alongside Windows 10. They are both currently installed on my SN750 SSD, like so:

 

(209.16 GB being the Linux partition)

 

Windows is the default OS in the BIOS, My BIOS options appear like so:

 

For some bizarre reason Ubuntu cannot be set as a boot option. However, when I go to the boot override it is an option.

And everything works just fine inside the OS.

 

If I could get Ubuntu to be the default boot option, its boot loader would offer me the option to boot into Windows or Linux, so that would be preferable. What can I do?

[Sauron]

3 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

They are both currently installed on my SN750 SSD, like so

This is a bad idea because Windows likes to overwrite the bootloader when you update it.

4 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

For some bizarre reason Ubuntu cannot be set as a boot option. However, when I go to the boot override it is an option.

This seems like some weird quirk of your motherboard's bios... either way I suggest using a dedicated drive and setting it as the default for bootup.

[RageTester]

grub2win or EasyBCD

[Helpful Tech Witch]

When installed linux on a second drive, I also installed grub and that allowed me to boot, then select the os to run (xubuntu, xubuntu safemode, windows, windows safemode, etx)

[Fasauceome]

5 hours ago, RageTester said:

grub2win or EasyBCD

I downloaded grub2win but unfortunately, even with Linux set as the default boot option, windows loads straight away 

 

[Fasauceome]

5 hours ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

When installed linux on a second drive, I also installed grub and that allowed me to boot, then select the os to run (xubuntu, xubuntu safemode, windows, windows safemode, etx)

Would this be a suitable way to do this?

[Helpful Tech Witch]

1 minute ago, Fasauceome said:

Would this be a suitable way to do this?

Maybe?

[Fasauceome]

5 hours ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

Maybe?

I tried this out but it seems my boot loader still does not show up and offer Ubuntu.

 

Is there a way of checking inside windows itself to see if the change went through?

[SprinkledDount]

On 10/27/2021 at 12:04 PM, Fasauceome said:

I tried this out but it seems my boot loader still does not show up and offer Ubuntu.

You probably have to go into your bios and select the Linux boot disk. I had to do that when I did a Linux/Windows dual boot.

[Fasauceome]

1 minute ago, SprinkledDount said:

You probably have to go into your bios and select the Linux boot disk. I had to do that when I did a Linux/Windows dual boot.

Could you be more specific?

[SprinkledDount]

You go into your bios and you find what the boot disk is and it will probably say windows boot manager. You want to change that to be what ever the grub boot is called there.

[Fasauceome]

1 hour ago, SprinkledDount said:

You go into your bios and you find what the boot disk is and it will probably say windows boot manager. You want to change that to be what ever the grub boot is called there.

I'm sorry, it doesn't look like you have seen the images I included in my original post. As you can see, the Linux boot option is curiously not available as an option, except for the boot override.

[SprinkledDount]

Can you change boot option 1 to be Ubuntu? Like click the drop down and select it there?

[Master Disaster]

Boot into Ubuntu

Open terminal and get sudo

lsblk

take note of your ubuntu partition id and efi boot partition id (I'll use sda3 and sda1 for this example, swap em out for whatever yours is)

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt

mkdir /mnt/boot

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot

mkinitcpio -P

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/mnt/boot --bootloader-id=GRUB

grub-mkconfig -o /mnt/boot/grub/grub.cfg

cd /

umount /mnt/boot

umount /mnt

[Fasauceome]

5 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

take note of your ubuntu partition id and efi boot partition id (I'll use sda3 and sda1 for this example, swap em out for whatever yours is)

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt

mkdir /mnt/boot

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot

I think this is what I want but correct me if I'm wrong:

 

nvme0n1p2 would equate to sda3 in your example, and nvme0n1p5 would equate to sda1?

 

 

here's a screenshot of all my drives for reference

[Master Disaster]

1 hour ago, Fasauceome said:

I think this is what I want but correct me if I'm wrong:

 

nvme0n1p2 would equate to sda3 in your example, and nvme0n1p5 would equate to sda1?

 

 

here's a screenshot of all my drives for reference

Hmm, which ubuntu variant did you install? Your boot partition seems to be setup for systemd boot, not grub.

 

This is why you have the issue you have, systemd boot cannot dual boot.

[Fasauceome]

2 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Hmm, which ubuntu variant did you install? Your boot partition seems to be setup for systemd boot, not grub.

 

This is why you have the issue you have, systemd boot cannot dual boot.

I used rufus to make my install media and used the Ubuntu 20.04 iso from their site.

 

Is there a way to change this with the current install? I don't know exactly where I went wrong so I'm not sure what I would change to make it right if I reinstall

[Master Disaster]

46 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

I used rufus to make my install media and used the Ubuntu 20.04 iso from their site.

 

Is there a way to change this with the current install? I don't know exactly where I went wrong so I'm not sure what I would change to make it right if I reinstall

Its worthwhile taking a look in your current efi directory to see whats actually there so do

 

mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt

cd /mnt

 

then take a look through the files and folders and see if you can find any conf files that might tell you what it did. If it did install grub (and it 100% should have done) then there should be a grub folder in the root with a grub.cfg file inside it.

 

If it did install grub then I think I know whats wrong, from terminal do

sudo su (then enter your users password)

nano /etc/fstab

 

Find the line that is mounting your boot partition, it will be the fat/fat32/vfat one in the list, if you look at its mount point and you'll see its currently /boot/efi, this is wrong for grub, it should be just /boot

 

edit - Also dont forget to unmount it before you reboot

 

cd /

umount /mnt

 

Heres mine as an example

 

*I strongly advise that instead of altering the line directly you copy it to a new line, comment one of them out and alter the other.

[Fasauceome]

3 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Its worthwhile taking a look in your current efi directory to see whats actually there so do

 

mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt

cd /mnt

 

then take a look through the files and folders and see if you can find any conf files that might tell you what it did. If it did install grub (and it 100% should have done) then there should be a grub folder in the root with a grub.cfg file inside it.

 

If it did install grub then I think I know whats wrong, from terminal do

sudo su (then enter your users password)

nano /etc/fstab

 

Find the line that is mounting your boot partition, it will be the fat/fat32/vfat one in the list, if you look at its mount point and you'll see its currently /boot/efi, this is wrong for grub, it should be just /boot

 

edit - Also dont forget to unmount it before you reboot

 

cd /

umount /mnt

 

Heres mine as an example

 

*I strongly advise that instead of altering the line directly you copy it to a new line, comment one of them out and alter the other.

This seems pretty comprehensive so I will definitely try this when I get the chance tomorrow

[Fasauceome]

19 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Find the line that is mounting your boot partition, it will be the fat/fat32/vfat one in the list, if you look at its mount point and you'll see its currently /boot/efi, this is wrong for grub, it should be just /boot

I edited the file and saved it like you described

 

 

changed /boot/efi to /boot. However, the Ubuntu install still does not show up as an option in the BIOS. Now when I select the Ubuntu install in the boot override menu I get this message

 

"x86/cpu sgx disabled by bios"

""nvme0n1p5 clean ... (etc)"

[finest feck fips]

On 10/31/2021 at 7:19 AM, Master Disaster said:

Hmm, which ubuntu variant did you install? Your boot partition seems to be setup for systemd boot, not grub.

Pop_OS uses systemd-boot, and they tie in their systemd-boot usage with their custom release upgrade process. If you change this and you are in fact using a distro like Pop which counts on it, you could possibly break your OS install on future upgrades.
 

 

On 10/31/2021 at 10:58 AM, Master Disaster said:

Find the line that is mounting your boot partition, it will be the fat/fat32/vfat one in the list, if you look at its mount point and you'll see its currently /boot/efi, this is wrong for grub, it should be just /boot

This is unwise for the reasons mentioned above, and it's also factually incorrect in two ways.

1. You can use GRUB with EFI partitions mounted wherever you want. I'm typing this from a system that boots via GRUB and has the ESP partition mounted on /boot/efi right now.

 

(The same is true of systemd-boot; you just use the --esp-path argument to point to /boot/efi if that's where your ESP is, whenever you call bootctl install. See the bootctl manual subsections on the --boot-path and --esp-path options.)

2. The Debian convention is to mount the ESP to /boot/efi anyway. See here for an example of documentation indicating this. That's why just changing the mountpoint of the ESP to /boot rendered the Ubuntu system unbootable: it likely mounted the ESP over configuration files in /boot that the bootloader needs to read.

What you probably misremembered or misstated is that systemd-boot is associated with mounting the ESP to /boot, like the Arch wiki suggests here:

 

Quote

Typical mount points

The simplest scenarios for mounting EFI system partition are:

• mount ESP to /efi and use a boot loader which is capable of accessing the kernel(s) and initramfs image(s) that are stored elsewhere (typically /boot). See Arch boot process#Boot loader for more information on boot loader requirements and capabilities.
• mount ESP to /boot. This is the preferred method when directly booting an EFISTUB kernel from UEFI or booting it via a boot manager like systemd-boot.
• mount ESP to /efi and additionally mount an "Extended Boot Loader Partition" (XBOOTLDR) to /boot. This can be useful when a previously created ESP is too small to hold multiple boot loaders and/or kernels but the ESP cannot be easily resized (such as when installing Linux after Windows to dual boot). This method is supported by at least systemd-boot.

 

but this is a preference, not a compatibility issue. Again, see the bootctl manual's section on the --esp-path argument:

 

Quote

--esp-path=

Path to the EFI System Partition (ESP). If not specified, /efi/, /boot/, and /boot/efi/ are checked in turn. It is recommended to mount the ESP to /efi/, if possible.

 

This is very different from ‘/boot/efi is wrong for this bootloader’, which is an impression you might get from the Arch wiki.

The Arch wiki is nice or whatever, but if you're not paying attention you can end up exporting Arch-isms to other distros like this. Which is a bummer when it results in an unbootable system for someone else. Please don't do this.

[finest feck fips]

  

5 hours ago, Fasauceome said:

changed /boot/efi to /boot. However, the Ubuntu install still does not show up as an option in the BIOS. Now when I select the Ubuntu install in the boot override menu I get this message

You're gonna need to change that configuration back to get your system to boot. You'll need to boot up some Linux live media, such as the Ubuntu installation media. From there, you need to mount the root partition of your Ubuntu installation, then edit your fstab file back.

Do you need help figuring out how to do that?

[finest feck fips]

31 minutes ago, finest feck fips said:

2. The Debian convention is to mount the ESP to /boot/efi anyway.

Yeah, I just double-checked this on an un-customized Ubuntu 21.10 installation I have installed on another SSD in this computer, and there the bootloader is GRUB and the ESP is mounted to /boot/efi. So this holds for Ubuntu as well.

@Fasauceome, once we get your system booting, I'll show you how to actually check whether a Debian-based system is using GRUB or systemd-boot.

[Fasauceome]

42 minutes ago, finest feck fips said:

This is unwise for the reasons mentioned above, and it's also factually incorrect in two ways.

why does Linux need to be so appealing yet so confusing...

16 minutes ago, finest feck fips said:

You're gonna need to change that configuration back to get your system to boot.

apparently not, because I made the change and I am still able to boot with no problem.

 

I changed it back per your recommendation (and since it didn't exactly help)

 

[finest feck fips]

Just now, Fasauceome said:

apparently not, because I made the change and I am still able to boot with no problem.

Oh, I didn't see the text after that image you posted! Well that's nice. The only thing it needed which it covered up was the image file Ubuntu used for a bootsplash, which is presumably why it showed the text and put that generic image in there.

Anyway that makes things easier! Give me a few minutes to eat and I'll write up some notes for you.