Re: Troubles installing alongside Windows 8.1

On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 9:18 AM, Ron Leach <ronleach@tesco.net> wrote:

On 28/08/2014 16:58, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:

On reboot, it went unconditionally to Windows 8.1. No signs of GRUB.
It seems I'm still missing something. I wonder what.

Kevin, is it worth cross-checking that the boot/BIOS is set up like this:

http://d-i.debian.org/manual/en.amd64/ch03s06.html#boot-dev-select

This was no help. Only one suggestion was new to me: disabling fast startup in Windows. I did that but see no difference.

I have been looking into dual boot with 8.1 because I was thinking about a new laptop, and most of the reports I have seen have mentioned the effect that you see. Someone had suggested that W8.1 is rewriting the boot loader back to its 'original' as a security measure (in case it had been changed for bad purposes). Apparently, there is a remark on MS support site about this behaviour, but I have not seen it. This article might help:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/235567/windows-8-removes-grub-as-default-boot-manager

This was better. First, the suggestion to use F12 was helpful: I wound up in a menu that allowed me to boot into Ubuntu on my hard drive for the very first time.

Its suggestion about the bcdedit Windows command did not help until I watched the youtube video and realized I had not known how to run the command prompt as administrator.

So: in Windows start menu, type "cmd" and _right_ click to run as administrator. One solution presented was then to type the command exactly as shown:

  bcdedit /set {bootmgr} path \EFI\ubuntu\grubx64.efi

It warned that it might not work for everyone. It turns out that included me. But the thread went on to a YouTube video that showed how to turn off Win 8.1's "automatic repair" that apparently restores the Windows bootloader whether you want it or not. The suggested fix was the command

bcdedit /set {current} recoveryenabled no

This also did nothing for me, but it might help folks who lose the ability to boot Ubuntu whenever they boot into Windows. I haven't gotten that far.

So what I have is F12 every time I want to boot into Ubuntu. It's workable but annoying. That's better than the prior unworkable state, so it counts as progress.

One interesting thing is that F12 is the familiar "boot menu" key. When I choose the drive I want to boot, it takes me to a second menu I've never seen before. It has Ubuntu in 3 different spellings, and only the uncapitalized "ubuntu" one takes me where I want to go. It was originally shorter. I'm not sure what I'm doing to add things to the menu, especially misleading broken things.

So mysteries remain, and I'll keep working on it.

This did not work for me,

When you do solve the problem, would you be able to post back explaining what you had to do?

regards Ron

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Kevin O'Gorman

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