[Boot-Repair] Graphical tool to repair the PC boot in one click

[marcasl]

Hello,

"grub-efi purge cancelled. Please report this message to boot.repair@gmail.com"

That's the message I see when I use Boot-Repair to fix the broken boot config on a Windows 8 / Ubuntu 13.04 multiboot HP Sleekbook.

Note: I use Legacy BIOS mode, LVM & a separate /boot partition.
The problems started when I installed Mint 17 as a 3rd choice of OS. That succeded but broke the GRUB configuration. I can no longer boot to Windows 8 or Ubuntu 13.04.

I can boot to Ubuntu 14.04.1 via liveUSB and install Boot-Repair using the 2nd option: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

Please can you help me repair this?
The new Bootinfo summary file is: http://paste.ubuntu.com/8039758/

Boy, does UEFI complicate dual-boot on recent hardware ...
Thanks for your help.

[oldfred]

I do not know LVM, but have seen user boot with UEFI or BIOS mode with that.
If you decide to reinstall only use Something Else. A major bug that they say is not a bug erases entire system with any auto install or even the "auto" reinstall over an existing Ubuntu. Something Else is only safe way to install.

You show grub in gpt protective MBR for BIOS boot and in efi partition for UEFI boot.

And HPs do not boot anything but Windows in UEFI mode, but there are mulitple work arounds to boot in UEFI mode with HP. Some seem to work better than others, depending on brand or even model.

Your sda6 says 12.10 with kernel 3.5.
From sda6, your sda8 says Secure Remix which is also 12.10 but kernel 3.8 and 3.9.
So not recently updated?

Windows entry in sda6 cannot boot Windows as it is a BIOS boot entry. Even if booted in UEFI mode it cannot chain to Windows with its entry.

Your sda8 shows Linux Mint 17 with kernel 3.13.
Its os-prober is the new version so it shows the efi partition chain, so if Mint booted in UEFI mode it should work, but if in BIOS mode it will not work.
And it says Secure remix in sda6.
But it has the LVM driver so os-prober also found the mapper and shows 13.04 in the LVM. But it also is using sda8 as /boot. That leads to major conflicts. You cannot share a /boot or an install and /boot.

Script used to add the lvm2 driver and show the details in the LVM, but it does not show anything.

I think you installed Mint into your boot partition for the LVM. Then you have conflicts as different configuration or kernels are in same place. Probably only last install or Mint works?

It may be possible to separate /boot from Mint but that would require a lot of work to copy one or the other and change all the fstab and reinstall grub to recognize new partition. I once moved to a /boot partition, but about two minutes later realized that was not what I wanted and moved the /boot back. This was back with grub legacy and I really wanted a grub only boot partition to chain loader. With grub2 the chainload is not required.

You do show grub in efi partition. Does that boot something when in UEFI mode. And you should always be able to turn on UEFI mode and directly boot Windows from UEFI or from one time boot key. Only from protective MBR can you only boot one system and then have to rely on grub to multi-boot.

[ceciliasp]

Hi,
I have a UEFI system that came with Window 8 pre-installed.
I've deleted windows and installed Ubuntu without noticing that I was installing it in UEFI mode.
Now I'm bootin on with CSM mode enabled and I installed a second partition with Mint 17 Cinnamon.
What I see is that when I'm prompted with the booting options I still see the EUFI Windows option.
How can I fix this?
Is it possible to just delete the fat32 (flagged "boot") by running a live usb and gparted?
Would this affect my system in anyway?

Thanks

[oldfred]

@ceciliasp

If Ubuntu is in UEFI mode you need the efi partition to boot it with UEFI on and CSM/Legacy/BIOS mode off.
But then you may have to turn on CSM to boot Mint.

What brand & model computer. Some only boot Windows entry in UEFI mode, and one good work around if not booting Windows is to copy grub to the Windows boot folder and rename it to be the Windows efi boot file. Then system can think it is booting Windows, but really boots Windows.
Ubuntu only on HP, recreate Windows folder and grub as Windows boot file
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2238714

If only booting in CSM mode, you have to remove Windows folder in efi partition as UEFI will add it to its memory again, then after deleting that folder use efibootmgr to delete Windows entry from UEFI's NVRAM.

# from liveDVD or flash and use efibootmgr
sudo efibootmgr -v
The "-v" option displays all the entries so you can confirm you're deleting the right one, and then you use the combination of "-b ####" (to specify the entry) and "-B" (to delete it). Examples #5 is delete:
http://linux.dell.com/cgi-bin/gitweb...README;hb=HEAD
http://software.intel.com/en-us/arti...and-scripting/



GPT Advantages (older but still valid) see post#2 by srs5694:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1457901
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...antages_of_GPT
UEFI Advantages
http://askubuntu.com/questions/44696...y-vs-uefi-help

[ceciliasp]

My computer is a ASUS SC400 i5-3317U CPU @ 1.70GHz × 4 64-b
I'm not running Windows anymore.
I'm only using Ubuntu (which I can run both in UEFI and Legacy Mode) but I would like to use some other Linux distros.
I'm kinda lost.... should I stick to UEFI mode or Legacy mode?
Is there any advantage/disadvantage?

Thanks in advance

[oldfred]

Posted advantages above.

Most newer distributions use grub2 which works with UEFI. But some vendors make it a bit more difficult Not sure about Asus.
Can you directly boot the Ubuntu entry in UEFI?

But this very knowledgeable user has some issues with his Asus, but a different model.
ASUS Zenbook UX301LAA ultrabook under Linux - reboot, power issues
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTcwOTQ

It becomes more to try it for a while and see if you have issues or if issues are show stoppers. Then try BIOS mode. You can easily switch if you have both an efi partition for UEFI boot and a bios_grub partition for BIOS/CSM boot. Boot-Repair can walk you thru the process but it is uninstall/reinstall grub-pc for BIOS or grub-efi-amd64 for UEFI. Not sure if Boot-Repair recognizes now that the package name has changed from grub-efi to grub-efi-amd64. I think they changed name as they are working on a 32 bit version, and need two names.

How did you get to this thread? I thought I updated instructions in wiki to just start a new thread in the forum. Better for other users to have your model computer & issue in title so others can find thread & is solved they know what may or may not work.

[marcasl]

@oldfred,
thank you for your reply and the warning about reinstalling.
The release notes for 14.04.1 mention that but you say the "Something Else" option is still the only safe way to install.

Legacy BIOS mode is the only method of booting that worked when I installed Raring 13.04.
As you say, "HPs do not boot anything but Windows in UEFI mode". I haven't tried workarounds I see on post #2101
Furthermore I see they are lost after a Windows update.

> I think you installed Mint into your boot partition for the LVM.
Yes. I wanted to share /boot (sda8) across additional installations, but that is not a good idea, as GRUB does not use the /vmlinuz symlink, but finds the most recent kernel in /boot, resulting in conflicts.
A closer look at Bootinfo summary showed that grub-efi and grub-efi-amd64 could not be installed by boot-repair because Raring is not a current release.

However, I was able to grub-install manually after setting up a chroot, without installing new packages.

But first, I moved the files for the recent kernel provided by Mint 17, from the /boot partition to a sub-directory.
From 14.04.1 liveUSB, I exited from boot-repair which I had installed using the 2nd option & I used the boot-repair mount points to prepare the chroot and the grub-update / grub-install commands:

sudo mount /dev/mapper/vg0-vol_root /mnt/boot-sav/mapper/vg0-vol_root
sudo mount /dev/sda8 /mnt/boot-sav/mapper/vg0-vol_root/boot
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/boot-sav/mapper/vg0-vol_root/boot/efi

sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/boot-sav/mapper/vg0-vol_root/dev
sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/boot-sav/mapper/vg0-vol_root/proc
sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/boot-sav/mapper/vg0-vol_root/sys

sudo chroot /mnt/boot-sav/mapper/vg0-vol_root

update-grub

sudo grub-install /dev/sda

Those commands restored the default boot to Windows 8 (I'm still in Legacy BIOS boot mode),
but I have to escape to BIOS and select the hard-drive as boot device before getting to the grub menu.
From there I can boot to Ubuntu 13.04 and Windows 8.

A new Boofinfo is here:
http://paste.ubuntu.com/8055560/

It looks like boot-repair can't fix that and make the grub menu appear by default, without the Reinstall GRUB option (which will fail again) ?
Most Advanced options, such as GRUB location, are gone if I de-select "Reinstall GRUB".

Is there a manual operation to make the GRUB menu load by default?

The EFI partition (sda2) currently has the 'boot' flag, but I'm using Legacy BIOS mode, so I don't see why Windows 8 boots automatically.
I should first check out this post to ensure I can restore Windows 8 & the EFI partition, if required:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...0#post12611710

Thanks for your advice.

[oldfred]

@marcasi
If you have UEFI on or if UEFI with secure boot is on, and a HP computer only Windows will boot.
Not sure if you can set it to CSM only mode or not. As it will boot UEFI first if mode is UEFI and CSM.
CSM - UEFI Compatibility Support Module (CSM), which emulates a BIOS mode

And Windows only boots in UEFI mode from gpt partitioned drive.
UEFI and CSM are not compatible and once you start booting in one mode cannot switch to the other mode.

Best to not use a separate /boot partition with multiple installs. But if using LVM with encryption, you have to have a separate /boot.

With gpt partitioning the boot flag must be on the efi partition. It is not like the boot flag in BIOS/MBR that specifies which Windows partition has boot files. With UEFI/gpt it really is a long GUID code that says this partition has all UEFI boot files.

[juanbajista]

Hello!

I have been running Ubuntu alongside Windows 8 for about a year now, but always had to wade through Windows to get to Ubuntu. I did some research and found some posts suggesting that I use boot-repair to make it so that my computer would give me the option to go to Windows or Ubuntu from the moment I turn on my computer - something that I would very much like to be able to do. I followed the directions & installed boot-repair & ran the one-click fix... and my computer will no longer even give me the option to go to Ubuntu! I guess the information about my boot-repair session is at http://paste.ubuntu.com/8155097/

Please help!

[fantab]

@juanbajista:
You seem to have installed Ubuntu in 'legacy/csm' mode while your Windows is in EFI.

parted -l:

Model: ATA Hitachi HTS54505 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 500GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start   End     Size    File system     Name                          Flags
1      1049kB  316MB   315MB   fat32           EFI system partition          boot
2      316MB   1259MB  944MB   ntfs            Basic data partition          hidden, diag
3      1259MB  1394MB  134MB                   Microsoft reserved partition  msftres
4      1394MB  241GB   239GB   ntfs            Basic data partition          msftdata
5      241GB   241GB   367MB   ntfs                                          hidden, diag
6      241GB   360GB   119GB   ntfs            Basic data partition          msftdata
7      360GB   360GB   1049kB                                                bios_grub
8      360GB   475GB   115GB   ext4                                          msftdata
9      475GB   479GB   3712MB  linux-swap(v1)
10      479GB   500GB   21.5GB  ntfs            Basic data partition          hidden, diag

The 7th parition with 'bios_grub' flag is used to boot Ubuntu in Legacy/csm mode. You already have your 1 partition as EFI...
So using gparted remove the bios_grub flag from /dev/sda7 and re-run Boot-Repair.