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After using lubuntu on my laptop for quite a while, I decided to upgrade my desktop as well. I have windows 7 on /dev/sda and I installed debian on /dev/sdc. When I installed debian, I looked for window's efi partition (/dev/sda1) , and I installed grub there. Everything was fine.

A few days later, I decided to go from debian to kubuntu. Following the installer from a live usb, I chose 'use whole disk' and I overwrote /dev/sdc with kubuntu. At this point, booting from /dev/sda would go to grub-rescue, and from /dev/sdc would skip grub altogether, as it only had one entry.

The way I went from debian to kubuntu was probably not the best way. I repaired windows boot using a windows USB, and I enabled grub on /dev/sdc.

Now that both systems were fine, I tried update grub to detect windows but to no avail. I tried the grub-config program too and I looked through some questions here but nothing worked with me.

I am aware of my limitations and that I got to this point simply because of bad decisions. I can boot into windows but it's not convenient, I have to manually select its disk on the boot menu. I'd like to have it in grub too. Any suggestions?

I ran boot-repair from a live usb and here's the output

Luís Alves
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1 Answers1

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I managed to find a solution. Apparently, a UEFI system can't detect a BIOS system. What I suspect happened was that when I installed debian, the installer detected that windows was installed as BIOS legacy mode, and installed itself as BIOS too. Then, when I uninstalled debian, windows boot got corrupted, and there was nothing for the kubuntu installer to detect, so it was installed as UEFI. Later I fixed windows, leaving me with two incompatible OSs. Take that with a grain of salt, it's just my interpretation of the situation.

The solution I found is here.

Note: Even though I have windows 7, when I ran the commands as the linked solution states from a windows 7 installer, the last step failed (bcdboot c:\windows /s s: /f UEFI). The /f option was not recognized. I re-ran everything through a windows 10 installer command line and it worked perfectly.

Luís Alves
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