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I konw I know. Probably the 1000th post about this but I really feel like I have tried everything.

Grub2Win, BootRepair. Manually reinstalling grub from live usb stick.. Nothing.

So A while ago I had a working dual boot with Windows 10 and Fedora. I wanted to swap to Ubuntu and dont really remember how I did it. Installed ubuntu and boom. no more fedora, no more ubuntu, just windows.

I tried grub2win added an entry to the drive I installed ubuntu on, but I could never get grub2win to boot.

In windows I deleted all the

If I go into the boot manager I see:

  1. fedoragrubx64
  2. gnugrubkernel64
  3. fedora
  4. Windows Boot Manager

which is infuriating and disappointing since I deleted all fedora related EFI stuff using bcdedit /enum firmware and bcdedit /delete.

I tried this questions marked answer step by step

I tried boot-repair-disk. with the recommended settings. Created a pastebin with the output https://pastebin.com/hH5ae1Zi (which looks like a mess tbh).

I imagine I should clean this efi drive but I dont know how to without getting my windows nuked as well..

Also sorry if this is not the correct forum point me in the right direction.

z0l1
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1 Answers1

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Your Boot Repair output indicates EFI-mode installs of both Windows and Ubuntu, although there are hints that /dev/sda may have been used for a BIOS-mode install of Windows in the past, and a BIOS-mode Linux distribution may have existed on /dev/sdb in the past. I believe that these are issues of archaeology, though, not recent events.

Given that Boot Repair hasn't worked for you, my suggestion is this:

  1. Download the USB flash drive version of my rEFInd boot manager and write it to a USB flash drive. (You'll need to unpack the .zip file and follow the instructions in the README-flashdrive.txt file it contains.) You could use the CD-R version instead, if your computer has an optical drive.
  2. Plug in the USB flash drive, reboot the computer, and use the computer's own boot manager to boot the USB flash drive. (Details vary from one machine to another, but if you booted an Ubuntu installer, you presumably know how to do this.) The result should be the rEFInd menu appearing.
  3. In rEFInd, try booting both Windows and Ubuntu. Both should work, but it's conceivable you'll have problems to overcome. Note that the Ubuntu boot is likely to display a lot of text rather than a nice graphical splash screen, but don't worry about that right now.
  4. Once you can boot both Windows and Ubuntu, you can then try either of two things:
    • Open a Terminal window in Ubuntu and type sudo grub-install to try to get GRUB working from the actual Ubuntu installation. This has a better chance of working than Boot Repair from an emergency medium.
    • Install rEFInd to your hard disk. You can do this from the rEFInd menu (there's a second-row option to install from the USB drive to the hard disk); or in an Ubuntu Terminal window by typing sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rodsmith/refind followed by sudo apt install refind. (You can actually omit the first command, but that will install an older version of rEFInd, so I recommend using the PPA.)

In theory, this procedure should get you up and running. In practice, there could be something wrong with your installation that's not obvious to me from my examination of your Boot Repair output, or you could hit some quirky stumbling block. If you get to the final step and try to install GRUB but that doesn't work, you can try to install rEFInd afterwards, or vice-versa.

Rod Smith
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