Luckily it’s usually an easy fix if you know your way around the UEFI. Just plop grub back where it needs to be in the boot order.
Although I definitely wish Windows didn’t mess with the boot order occassionally.
Also, finally, I dual-boot and I haven’t actually had this happen in about a year now. I think maybe Microsoft finally stopped fucking around (with this one thing).
EDIT: Actually, it could be because I’m on Windows 10 and they stopped “Feature Updates” and all I get are security updates now. That could be why they stopped fucking with my boot order.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-sorry-but-no-more-feature-updates-for-windows-10
I had to put a password on my bios to get windows 10 to stop messing with my boot order.
I can’t recall a single feature from any feature update being added.
What users consider “Features” and what Microsoft considers “Features” are wildly different. I’d say that probably played a role in it.
Honestly, the only useful “features” in Windows I’ve found in the last few years were all provided by a non-standard Microsoft app that isn’t easy to find: PowerToys.
PowerShell is nice too, but it’s not new enough to be considered a “feature” anymore.
Actually, it could be because I’m on Windows 10 and they stopped “Feature Updates” and all I get are security updates now. That could be why they stopped fucking with my boot order.
Same here, I was wondering why my days were so (relatively) calm as of late…
The partition is there. It’s just that Windows overwrites the MBR as if no other operating systems could possibly exist.
It’s 2023, Linux has great UEFI support, there is no reason to be using MBR over GPT.
My system doesn’t have UEFI support, so there’s that.
Valid reason, then.
It’s 2023, Linux has great UEFI support, there is no ONE reason to be using MBR over GPT.
I have to admit, I’m a little surprised someone has a machine that doesn’t support UEFI, because the board I bought in 2012 had UEFI support… 11 years puts most machines into barely being usable in Windows.
While it’s a valid reason, guy has to be working with either some really old or very specific hardware.
its not that weird considering the cult-like appreciation of old thinkpads
The thing is… I think a lot of people don’t know that they have uefi support…
I have had the same windows install and motherboard (AMD is so great with long term socket support) for years, and figuring out how to change my bios and os setting so that I got a propper uefi boot was non-trivial.
Uefi has been a thing for a long time, but it’s not been the default for motherboards afaik. So you have had to go into bios and find the right settings.
Is this why my grub disappeared? I didnt pay attention on my gaming pc and then a few weeks later I noticed when I wanted to boot into linux. Fucking windows.
Check your boot order in uefi, if grub is not in there, it’s evivars got deleted by a bios update, which can happen in windows depending on your motherboard vendor.
Some live usbs (I know manjaro’s does) present you the option to boot from disk, so you can get into your system without chrooting and reinstall grub + evivars.
have u considered multiple drives for ur pc?
Never happened to me and I’ve been dual booting for a couple of years already. On the other side, updating linux mint from 20 to 21 made my printer not work despite installing and reinstalling the drivers many times ( tried the driver from the official website, random scripts from GitHub, nothing works). It’s pretty dumb having to boot crapdows (it takes 20 minutes to just boot no joke and i freaking debloated that shit the day i installed it.) to print anything and it’s basically why none of my family wants to deal with linux.
Just a thought, no idea if it would work for your situation, would you be able to use a Windows vm, that way you wouldn’t have to reboot?
as the “it takes 20 minutes to boot” implies, the computer is pretty weak. 4GB ddr3, HDD and a i3 4xxx.
Fact check: true
Source: It happened to me.
Fact check: false
Source: It didn’t happen to me.
Checkmate atheists.
Fact check… false?? (it’s false? did they just say fact check false? my goodness they fact checked it false! nothing’s ever false! my god!)
I just use wsl2 instead of dual booting, haven’t had a real issue since Just ran into a few hiccups where you have to clear the environment variable $DISPLAY whenever you’re using a package manager besides apt and apt-get, for instance whenever you’re using pip
I used WSL2 for about a year between distro hops.
I agree it’s mostly the more peaceful way if you can’t afford to just remove Windows altogether.
Still love me some freshly installed Linux tho :(
I like Linux desktop environments more (KDE GNOME LXDE…) they’re look pretty slick smooth and highly customizable, if I hadn’t using an old PC and OC is a must I’ll surly switch to Linux
I still can’t replace MS Excel.
Then don’t.
But could you use the web version? Except you are pirating it. I also assume that some features don’t exist in the web version but Microsoft pushed the usage to web versions by banning Chromebook users from downloading Office from Play Store.
I have used the Web version but it does not have those “Alt” key shortcuts, that’s the only thing I miss in Libre Calc. That and the auto complete.
I’m using pirated Excel 2016. Has not crashed even once. While the web thing freezes as it wishes.
I’ve been quite happy with wps office as a replacement to Ms office products. Much happier than I was using Libre office. I dunno if it will do everything you do in excel, but it does everything I’m used to doing in excel.
Some of the new motherboards will recognize dual boot systems natively. My ASUS saw the partitions when I upgraded my motherboard and gives me a boot option menu. Super easy. Not that GRUB was too difficult.
So, long story ahead…
Couple weeks ago Windows screwed me over by converting a disk to dynamic disk (whatever that means) when trying to extend a partition, making it impossible to boot to Linux since whatever format is used for dynamic disks is proprietary, also, it just plain removed my GRUB from existence.
Then when trying to roll that back with obscure methods (since Microsoft claims in all their documentation and forums that the only way to roll back to basic disk is by wiping and reformatting) I ended up with two conflicting partition tables!
Long story short(er) I painfully backed up everything, took my chance on the MBR table since it looked the least scary of the two (luckily I was right), and reinstalled GRUB from a bootable USB.
I lost a Saturday on that shit and learned to never touch a single drive from Windows ever again.
PS: Always back up your data regularly, because fuck me Windows makes existing almost intolerable.
I’ve been using systemd-boot instead during the last time I had to dual boot which lasted for like 2 years
Windows didn’t interfere with systemd-boot at all and stood the test of time even after the many updates
(Probably because Lennard Poettering now work for Microsoft)
The last time I dual-booted, which is a while ago, it was grub that keeps losing my windows boot option. Not sure what happened there, since I’m still a newbie at Linux.
The OS_prober feature is disabled by default in GRUB 2.06, which is the version included in Ubuntu 22.04. This is an upstream change designed to counter potential security issues with the OS-detecting feature (it mounts partitions to check for other OSes, this could be taken advantage of, etc).
That’s why. You need to enable the os_prober in your grub settings manually or put your windows line in /etc/default/grub or so.
Yo, thanks for this. I’ll save this for the next time I’m motivated enough to try dual-booting again. Currently I just care about playing games, so tinkering with it will have to wait.
You’re welcome, I’m happy to point out the correct term to search for.
If you don’t want to take care of stuff like this, you can choose a distro like Mint that would be more sensitive to shield their users from changes like this. There is plenty to learn and tinker without having to follow upstream news that could break your system.
