Fedora/Grub Windows Bootloader Bug

[linkboy]

Just a head's up, if you're dual-booting with Windows and running Fedora, hold off of updating Fedora.

 

There's a bug in the latest update of Grub that is breaking Grub's ability to boot Windows.

 

It might be possible to boot into Windows by using your computer's UEFI menu, but in my case, this bug totally broke my Windows install. Windows would just boot to its Automatic Repair option and that would fail to fix anything.

 

I ended up having to reinstall both operating systems to get my computer back to a bootable state.

[Ralphred]

1 hour ago, linkboy said:

I ended up having to reinstall both operating systems

Did you not just consider downgrading grub?

[linkboy]

4 minutes ago, Ralphred said:

Did you not just consider downgrading grub?

 

Downgrading Grub wouldn't have fixed my Windows partition. No matter what I did, I couldn't get into Windows. Even if I bypassed GRUB and used my laptop's UEFI boot menu, Windows would just load into it's repair option, fail to fix what it thought was wrong and just not boot.

 

I probably could have booted into a command prompt and tried to fix Window's EFI partition, but the problem just would have come back up again if I mistakenly tried to load Windows via GRUB.

 

It was just easier to reinstall both OS's (Windows needed a reinstall anyways) and not update Fedora until the bug gets fixed. 

[Ralphred]

16 minutes ago, linkboy said:

and not update Fedora until the bug gets fixed

Do they not have a "masking protocol" where you can force the package manager to ignore certain package versions? 

18 minutes ago, linkboy said:

Windows needed a reinstall anyways

Haha, I feel that one bro, VM's with "fresh install" snapshot FTW.

 

I've never found a use case for "just install them on separate drives, and use the UEFI boot menu" until now. You should be able to set GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true in /etc/default/grub to stop grub generating Windows entries in it's boot menu, that way you can't even accidentally "mistakenly tried to load Windows via GRUB.". You can test if it's working by running grub-mkconfig >/dev/null. It will list the boot menu entries it would have generated if you ran it properly (grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg). 

 

I just don't like the idea of you having to sit on a not-up-to-date-system because of a bug on one of the smallest packages...

[C2dan88]

I disable os prober and manually set a grub boot entry for windows for my grub configuration

/etc/grub.d/40_custom.conf is set like this

menuentry "Windows" --class windows {
    savedefault
    insmod part_gpt
    insmod fat
    search --set=root --fs-uuid XXXX
    chainloader (${root})/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
}

Replace XXX with the uuid for your windows drive. Find it using

sudo lsblk -f

Works for me in manjaro and fedora.

[linkboy]

45 minutes ago, Ralphred said:

I've never found a use case for "just install them on separate drives, and use the UEFI boot menu" until now. You should be able to set GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true in /etc/default/grub to stop grub generating Windows entries in it's boot menu, that way you can't even accidentally "mistakenly tried to load Windows via GRUB.". You can test if it's working by running grub-mkconfig >/dev/null. It will list the boot menu entries it would have generated if you ran it properly (grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg). 

 

I just don't like the idea of you having to sit on a not-up-to-date-system because of a bug on one of the smallest packages...

 

I got it working.

 

I decided to just use rEFInd as my EFI bootloader instead of GRUB. Everything is working perfectly fine and I was able to update Fedora without GRUB nuking Windows. It's booting into both Windows and Fedora perfectly fine.