All about Grub issues and dual boot issues

[razaron]

Which system boot menu? what's the best way to go about doing a dual boot on separate drives? everytime I have dual booted when I wanted to remove linux was always leftover with the linux boot loader/selector even though the install had been deleted/wiped, has put me off trying again though I can use linux for 90% of the time for what I do on my PC and would be nice to try it again as it's been probably 12+ mths.

Google keywords you're looking for are "windows boot manager" and "grub2" (if UEFI).

As other's have mentioned, avoiding bootloaders and going "BIOS"/hardware is by far the easiest.

However, I do quite like Grub. Haven't dualbooted in a while (don't reboot, uptime go up) but I remember it was annoying to setup but great once you figured it out, since Grub supports everything. If you're too lazy (read: sunk cost fallacy) to blat/fix your MBR you can also just tell Grub to immediately boot into Windows. Exact method varies depending on which order you installed OSes, which version of Windows etc. hence annoying. But once you've got grub properly setup it should be good.

At least until a major Windows update "accidentally" sets Windows Boot Manager back to primary. Which is technically what you want anyway lol

If you're (not you, but the royal "you're", like the public at large,) manually configuring fstab, I would highly recommend not using drive letter/number assignments directly for this very reason. It's far better practice to use the block device UUID instead or a label. Just something that is going to persist regardless of the boot order or order devices are connected to the system. Just my 2¢ as I've been burned by doing this in the past.

WWNs are pretty neat too, for consistency with physical disks. Useful if you blat entire disks and do strange things. Like if you want to propogate something down to KVMs, you just wang it in the xml (I assume other hypervisors can do similar things). That said, NVMEs exist now (no WWN...) but you typically only have one which shows up as /dev/nvme0. I say that while having 2 on my PC... but only seen 1 on servers so far.

Been using Ubuntu (Gnome) as the main operating system for a while now.

Most of the stuff works but I do have to google stuff occasionally. Games run fine via Steam/Proton. Have used Wine before, it was ok too.

My laptop still runs Windows though due to Optimus (Nv + Intel) and as a general backup/secondary machine. The laptop has no audio on Linux due to some driver issues with Lenovo.

Googling is a dark art. I find Windows a pain to google strange things for. The Microsoft documentation is surprisingly correct for how large it is but there's the occasional inconsistency and (I assume) intentional ommission. Like this page "forgetting" to mention it works on Linux guests as well.

Maybe it's because I'm more comfortable with Linux from work, so have an easier time debugging before heading to google. You sort of need to know what you're googling for before you can google something... Also some things are just a pain to google. Recently tried googling "expressvpn preserve diagnostic logs" which just results in a billion hits of people paranoid about or praising expressvpns log policy

 

[bug]

However, I do quite like Grub. Haven't dualbooted in a while (don't reboot, uptime go up) but I remember it was annoying to setup but great once you figured it out, since Grub supports everything. If you're too lazy (read: sunk cost fallacy) to blat/fix your MBR you can also just tell Grub to immediately boot into Windows. Exact method varies depending on which order you installed OSes, which version of Windows etc. hence annoying. But once you've got grub properly setup it should be good.

Grub is useful for booting more than one kernel. If you upgrade to the latest and greatest and run into trouble, just select your backup kernel from the menu and you're back in business. It's also a great way to add one-time parameters to the kernel, should you want to try them first before writing them down for every boot.

 

[Wasteland]

Grub is useful for booting more than one kernel. If you upgrade to the latest and greatest and run into trouble, just select your backup kernel from the menu and you're back in business. It's also a great way to add one-time parameters to the kernel, should you want to try them first before writing them down foe every boot.

Exactly. I also appreciate that Grub gives me easy access to the UEFI menu. People sometimes complain that Grub is easy to break, but I've never had a problem with it.

 

[tpa-pr]

Exactly. I also appreciate that Grub gives me easy access to the UEFI menu. People sometimes complain that Grub is easy to break, but I've never had a problem with it.

I used to use Grub until I found systemd-boot. It is really simple to configure and straightforward to use, it's great. The bootloader is configured by /boot/loader/loader.conf, all boot entries are individual text files in /boot/loader/entries. No need to mess around with grub-update or anything like that either.

I think Grub is still the default for most major distros mind you?

 

[igormp]

I used to use Grub until I found systemd-boot. It is really simple to configure and straightforward to use, it's great. The bootloader is configured by /boot/loader/loader.conf, all boot entries are individual text files in /boot/loader/entries. No need to mess around with grub-update or anything like that either.

I think Grub is still the default for most major distros mind you?

+1 for systemd-boot, way simpler and easier to deal with IMO.

 

[unwind-protect]

Ugh, systemd.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I think Grub is still the default for most major distros mind you?

From what I've seen, seems to be. It is the default for AndroidX86.

 

[_roman_]

Exactly. I also appreciate that Grub gives me easy access to the UEFI menu. People sometimes complain that Grub is easy to break, but I've never had a problem with it.

Grub is obsolete

efibootmgr - Gentoo wiki

wiki.gentoo.org

grub is far too complicated. Better as lilo. regardless if grub 1 or grub 2.

i used the MSI B550 gaming edge wifi, now the ASUS Prime x670-P mainboard uefi bootloader. Just one command to tell where teh bootfile is.

I power on my mainboard and press f9 key which opens teh uefi bootloader. than i can select my boot entries or go into the uefi menu. msi had a different key for the bootlaoder menu.

to make things easier i use a single file which i create as efi boot stub kernel, see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/EFI_boot_stub

--

asus also forgets the boot entries when my default boot entry is windows 11 pro. e.g after cmos reset or uefi updates.
i found a permanet solution. i set my bootfile as default bootable. now the bootentry is never forgotten.

windows is always added to the uefi bootlist. microsoft implemented some sort of mechanism. gnu linux does not have that mechanism.

Summary: Just don't use grub. It's too fragile and not necessary

I never ever touched my bootloader entry since hardware platform change to am5 in may 2023.

efibootmgr -v

.....
Boot0002* Debug2    HD(****************************************************************)/\system_test.efi

That's all to boot my gnu gentoo linux

Sienna_Cichlid /boot # ls -alh /boot/system_test.efi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 22M Feb 23 04:07 /boot/system_test.efi

When you own legacy hardware like the ASUS-G75vw notebook with an ivybridge processor and old bios than you need grub of course. That was intel 3rd generation intel core processors, now we are at 15th generation.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Grub is obsolete

That is an opinion, not everyone agrees as it completely meets the needs of many distro builders.

 

[unwind-protect]

grub is fragile, granted.

But it does a few tricks you don't get with other boot mangelers. For example, imagine you have a multi-boot machine with Linux and FreeBSD or 2x Linux. You want to reboot into the other OS while the machine is 9000km away. With grub you can edit grub.cfg to start the next OS of your choice.

 

[igormp]

grub is fragile, granted.

But it does a few tricks you don't get with other boot mangelers. For example, imagine you have a multi-boot machine with Linux and FreeBSD or 2x Linux. You want to reboot into the other OS while the machine is 9000km away. With grub you can edit grub.cfg to start the next OS of your choice.

Not sure if I'm missing something from your example, but systemd-boot allows that as well, just issue a `systemctl reboot --boot-loader-entry=your-entry-name` and you should be good to go.

 

[tpa-pr]

Grub is obsolete

efibootmgr - Gentoo wiki

wiki.gentoo.org

I could've sworn efibootmgr was folded into systemd as systemd-boot, am I mistaken? I didn't think efibootmgr was standalone anymore...

 

[bug]

I used to use Grub until I found systemd-boot. It is really simple to configure and straightforward to use, it's great. The bootloader is configured by /boot/loader/loader.conf, all boot entries are individual text files in /boot/loader/entries. No need to mess around with grub-update or anything like that either.

I think Grub is still the default for most major distros mind you?

I know about systemd-boot but I haven't used it. I know grub-mkconfig is an extra step, but I have always looked at it as a safety guard against sloppy edits, typos and such.

 

[unwind-protect]

Not sure if I'm missing something from your example, but systemd-boot allows that as well, just issue a `systemctl reboot --boot-loader-entry=your-entry-name` and you should be good to go.

Only if the second system also uses systemd-boot. With grub you only have to be able to mount and edit a ext2fs to control the next boot.

 

[igormp]

Only if the second system also uses systemd-boot. With grub you only have to be able to mount and edit a ext2fs to control the next boot.

Not really, that command just chain loads the specific .efi file in your loader list.
But yeah, it's not as fancy as what you're saying, but still should be enough to boot any other system that has its own efi bootloader (like windows).

 

[unwind-protect]

Not really, that command just chain loads the specific .efi file in your loader list.
But yeah, it's not as fancy as what you're saying, but still should be enough to boot any other system that has its own efi bootloader (like windows).

Yes, but once in the other system, how do you boot back into the primary Linux system?

 

[igormp]

Yes, but once in the other system, how do you boot back into the primary Linux system?

Ahhhh, got it. Yeah, not possible, I see what you mean now.
It'd only boot back to the system that had the priority set, but you wouldn't be able to pick it at will. Not an issue if your primary system is the Linux one.

But in a similar vein, how would one boot back into Linux (assuming it's not the primary option) from windows using grub in a remote manner?