I recently got a Dell Inspiron 13z with Windows 8. I decided to dual boot Ubuntu.
After install, it was booting straight into Ubuntu, with no GRUB menu showing up. No problem. I just ran boot repair and everything seemed to work fine. (Here's the output, btw: http://paste.ubuntu.com/5891478/)
Then I booted into Windows. Now I can't seem to get back into Ubuntu. I tried disabling Fast Boot by running REG ADD "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Power" /V HiberbootEnabled /T REG_dWORD /D 0 /F
in PowerShell as Administrator. Even now, GRUB is still being bypassed somehow.
What should I do?
EDIT: I tried reinstalling GRUB by booting a LiveUSB and following this: https://superuser.com/questions/376470/how-to-reinstall-grub2-efi. Unfortunately, that didn't work.
Best Answer
The Boot Repair tool isn't 100% reliable. The problem you seem to have run into is that Boot Repair is rather over-enthusiastic about juggling boot loader files. Specifically, Boot Repair renames the Windows boot loader and installs a copy of GRUB in its place; however, this "repair," in addition to being terribly confusing, is sometimes undone by Windows -- Windows sees the change and (quite reasonably) re-installs its own boot loader. What's more, this "repair" is seldom necessary; the tool just applies it in a scattershot approach with a bunch of other "repairs" in the hopes that it will be useful. Unfortunately, sometimes it's not, and it can cause follow-on problems.
I recommend you try this:
/dev/sda1
). This will serve as a fallback in case you make matters worse.bcdedit /set {bootmgr} path \EFI\ubuntu\grubx64.efi
.