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I am quite new to Ubuntu and I have a problem. I have an Acer Aspire E5-573-P5AB and I had Windows 10 installed on it first. Then I installed Ubuntu 16.04 or 16.10 LTS. I can't remember which one.

Since I upgraded Ubuntu to 17.10, Grub decided to try booting Windows 10 from /dev/sda1, which is the recovery partition of Windows 10 instead of /dev/sda2, which is the main partition of Windows 10, and when I try to boot into Windows 10 I see the background color of grub and some glitchy lines on the screen, and then the laptop restarts in grub.

In order to boot in Windows 10 from grub, I have to highlight Windows 10 on Grub boot screen and edit the command to change hd0,msdos1 to hd0,msdos2. This is very annoying!

Also note that I used sudo update-grub several times and it still detects Windows 10 on /dev/sda1 instead of /dev/sda2. Can anybody help me? I am new and I don't know what to do! Also note that both OSes are installed in BIOS, not UEFI.

Here's my pastebin from Boot Repair

Elder Geek
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Alin Stanescu
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1 Answers1

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There are a number of tools you could try using. Boot Repair is one. Grub Customizer is another tool that comes to mind. However, since update-grub isn't working as advertised, it sounds like something is wrong with your partition flags on /dev/sda2 as the aforementioned script should generate menu entries for all bootable partitions regardless of OS or version thereof. Although it's not usually recommended, you could manually edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Find the menu entry that you've been editing at boot time to change hd0,msdos1 to hd0,msdos2 since you say that works. you can locate the specific line so that you can recognize the block you'll be editing with cat /boot/grub/grub.cfg | grep -A11 /dev/sda1 change every reference in that block between the curly braces from hd0,msdos1 to hd0, msdos2 there should be 3 of these. you may be able to get away with just changing the set root= part. You may also wish to change the menu entry title reference where is says on /dev/sda1 to on /dev/sda2 to avoid confusion later on.

The problem with the above approach is the next time you grub is updated it's likely to revert to the same behavior you are seeing now. It sounds like the root cause is something is wrong with the the grub configuration scripts or os-prober. the command sudo apt install --reinstall grub-common should resolve that and result in update-grub working as advertised.

Elder Geek
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