21.04 beta

[thomas_j_marshall2]

Was running 20.10 on a 120gb ssd alongside windows 10 but on separate discs. Had a spare 240 ssd so installed 21.04 beta on that. I manually partitioned an efi, /, home and swap and was forced to have a grub boot partition. Install went OK but grub customiser can't pick up windows 10 so I have to use f8 to boot. What have I done wrong?

[ActionParsnip]

Grub customizer only sets up GRUB for those too lazy to learn its config. It doesn't pick up installed operating systems. If you run:

sudo os-prober

What is the output?
Are there any bugs logged against GRUB or the customizer application in Hirsute?

[ajgreeny]

Impossible to know for sure but I wonder if you installed the beta 21.04 in UEFI or in legacy/BIOS mode.
You say that you had to create a grub-boot partition and that is usually needed only if booting in BIOS mode but using GPT partitions.
I have no idea about the Windows problem as I don't use it any more but I suspect that if your new OS is using BIOS mode that may mean it can not see the Windows 10 which will certainly be UEFI unless you personally installed it in BIOS mode.

From your Ubuntu system please run terminal command

sudo fdisk -l

and show us the output using Code-Tags as it makes that output much more easily read and understood, formatting the text as seen in terminal, not as plain text when it is copied and pasted.
See my signature below for a How-to

I would also advise you not to use grub-customiser as it can very easily create many more problems than it solves and it makes it much more difficult for other users to help as it changes or replaces so much of the normal configuration of grub and can make it almost impossible to configure grub in the usual way by manual edits of the various files in /etc/default/grub and /etc/grub.d.

[rbmorse]

If you were "forced" to manually create a grub boot partition, it sounds like the 21.04 installation wasn't completed in full EFI mode. Did you set the partition table type to GPT when you set up the spare 240 Gb SSD?

Also, the Ubuntu installer really, really likes to put the boot files on the first ESP detected (generally the Windows BCD). If you want to install 21.04's ESP on the 240 Gb ssd as appears to be the case, you'll need to remove the ESP flag from the existing ESP (or disconnect the device so the installer doesn't "see" it) and set the ESP flag to the EFI partition on the 21.04 drive before running the installer. You can (should) reset the flag to the other ESP after you've finished the installation. You can have more than one ESP in a system, but I'm told best practice is to not have more than one on any given physical device.

[thomas_j_marshall2]

Thanks for all the replies. The reason I use grub customiser is because I don't know any other way to get the two on the one menu. The drive is set to GPT and I'm not sure if the install was efi, I assume so as the pc is only a few months old. I'll run the commands.

[thomas_j_marshall2]

Disk /dev/sdd: 223.57 GiB, 240057409536 bytes, 468862128 sectors
Disk model: GIGABYTE GP-GSTF
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: CDA77003-C5DD-49A3-8D55-501972A8E20F

Device         Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sdd1       2048    391167    389120   190M BIOS boot
/dev/sdd2    1562624  99219455  97656832  46.6G Linux filesystem
/dev/sdd3   99219456 450781183 351561728 167.6G Linux filesystem
/dev/sdd4  450781184 468860927  18079744   8.6G Linux swap
/dev/sdd5     391168   1562623   1171456   572M EFI System

[thomas_j_marshall2]

There is an efi partition mounted containing folders boot microsoft and ubuntu.

[oldfred]

A bios_grub is only required for BIOS/CSM/Legacy installs on gpt partitioned drives. It normally is 1MB and must be unformatted.

UEFI & BIOS are not compatible.
Once you start booting from UEFI boot menu, you cannot switch boot mode. Or grub can only boot other installs in same boot mode.
Since you have an ESP on sdd, you can just uninstall the BIOS version of grub (grub-pc) and install the UEFI boot version of grub (grub-efi-amd64).
You can just run the commands from inside your install if you can boot.
Often easier with Boot-Repair. Be sure sure to boot live installer in UEFI boot mode. Mode you boot installer in, UEFI or BIOS is then how it installs or repairs. Only Ubiquity installer, installs grub's UEFI boot files to first drive's ESP. Grub can be installed to ESP on any drive, but just not with Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer without a work around.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

[thomas_j_marshall2]

[QUOTE
You can just run the commands from inside your install if you can boot.
[/QUOTE]Thanks. What commands do I run?

[ajgreeny]

Run command

sudo apt install grub-efi-amd64

As you have Windows installed you may need to use grub-efi-amd64-signed but wait for oldfred to come back again; I no longer use Windows so I'm not sure if the signed version is necessary or not.

Interestingly, even without Windows, I note that on my Xubuntu 20.04 system I have the signed version of grub installed; perhaps that is now the default, I'm just not sure.