Re: Troubles installing alongside Windows 8.1

On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 12:29 PM, Ron Leach <ronleach@tesco.net> wrote:

On 28/08/2014 19:34, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:

Windows can't be the culprit -- it did not get control between the
grub-update and the reboot, and even the first reboot went right to
Windows. So there's something that GRUB failed to do.

That's a compelling remark.

But, might it be that Secure Boot, which you said you'd enabled, can (irrespective of Grub being there, somewhere) only find Windows as a 'signed' OS so that is the only OS UEFI will load?

[My understanding is that Secure Boot will only load a cryptographically signed OS and that Windows is (so far) the only OS signed with a certificate that is trusted by UEFI.]

If that might be happening, have you tried turning OFF Secure Boot, so that an unsigned [insecure] OS can be booted? BIOS might think that Grub/Linux is untrusted because it is unsigned.

[I'm assuming that UEFI can be used in 'insecure boot' mode. I don't mean in 'Legacy' (CSM?) mode, which, as I understand it, is a different mode.]

If the BIOS and Windows and Grub are - truly - this incapable of getting along on your machine, might it be possible to ask the Windows boot loader to load Grub/Linux, as a W8 boot loader choice? I'm not sure whether that's possible?

Let me say again, I don't have W8.1 but am finding out about this issue (because I intend to get a W8.1 laptop). So what I say may be incorrect, but I have looked at a lot of pages about this and those two suggestions have been mooted elsewhere - though without follow-up indication whether they worked.

Regards, Ron

Hmm. I think we were both typing at the same time. GRUB and Windows do indeed work together in secure boot mode. Just not as well as I would like. So far. I have not turned off secure boot, and with a little effort I can boot to the OS I choose.

There's a considerable interplay of hardware, firmware and software going on here. So I expect user experience will depend on the details of the machine you get. I'm running a Toshiba Sattelite laptop.

Kevin O'Gorman

programmer, n. an organism that transmutes caffeine into software.

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