What actually happens when you boot the Windows installer?
Does it stall somewhere?
When you asked this I thought I'd go try it again. When I booted to the windows 10 flash drive it gave choices of what to do. I selected "troubleshoot repair boot problems" then it said it was not able to repair windows boot. Same result as before.
So I considered using the same flash drive to just reinstall windows. But before that I found another flash drive I made using macrium. I booted to it and it had a choice of repairing windows boot problems. So I ran it and it
fixed it, so now the computer boots straight into windows 10. However I guess that messed up Ubuntu because can't get back into grub. I rebooted several times with shift key, esc etc but so far it just goes straight to windows.
I think this is progress, I suppose I can just reinstall Ubuntu as I did before and have dual boot back again.
Yes, I think that it is a bit of progress.
Previously, Grub wouldn't boot Windows because Windows was not in a bootable condition.
Now that you have successfully repaired Windows, good old Microsoft has resumed its dominance over the boot process.
I would now run boot-repair again and, fingers crossed, it will re-install Grub to the disk and recognise a working Windows.
While OEMs may be required to use UEFI, an end user can still install Windows 10 (and presumably even Windows 11, but I don't know) in MBR mode. I did it unwittingly back in 2020(?) when I relented and installed Windows on my main setup, even though the existing Ubuntu installation was UEFI/GPT. Entirely separate boot drives too; grub could see the Windows partition, but couldn't boot from it; if I wanted to boot Windows, I had to use the motherboard's boot menu to do it.
The wrench in this was that I used VirtualBox to install Windows to the drive so it couldn't touch the existing Ubuntu installation. What I didn't realize at the time was that VirtualBox defaults to MBR, so that's how Windows installed itself.
Backups are of course recommended, but Windows 10 does have a utility to do an in-place conversion from MBR to GPT post-install. I used it to fix that above situation so that my Arc A770 could actually be configured properly (because settings related to turning on Resizeable BAR require UEFI, but setting it to UEFI only caused Windows to stop booting, which made me finally realize what had happened when I'd installed it). Afterwards Grub could boot either OS without an issue...until a couple weeks ago. I'm not sure if it was a Windows update, or the installer for 24.10, but I'm back to needing to use the motherboard's boot menu to get into Windows.Note conversion from MBR to gpt totally erases a drive. So backups required.
Yes, fully agree.
The above quotation was slavishly copied from the Recommendations (scroll towards end) here:-If you can possibly manage it, have one OS per computer
If you absolutely must have more than one OS per computer, at least have one OS per disk
If you absolutely insist on having more than one OS per disk, understand everything written on this page
https://www.happyassassin.net/posts/...lly-work-then/
It's worth a look, especially for PC users who like to experiment (i.e. dilettante (myself) rather than professional)
Last edited by tea for one; 4 Weeks Ago at 01:13 PM.
I had a working Windows/Ubuntu dual boot on one drive working well.
Then hardware issues & Windows corruption erased my working Ubuntu. Gave up on dual boot on one internal drive & now use an external SSD with Ubuntu on Windows laptop. Actually external SSD is a copy/backup of my desktop install. So far that has worked much better.
Have had no issues with multiple installs of Ubuntu & other Linux systems on same drive other than managing grub & boot order. I just have to keep main working LTS install as default boot & add others to its grub menu.
UEFI boot install & repair info - Regularly Updated :
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2147295
Please use Thread Tools above first post to change to [Solved] when/if answered completely.
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