Ubuntu – Windows 8 & Ubuntu 12.04 Dual Boot Menu Does Not Load

12.04dual-bootgrub2uefiwindows 8

I've read abt the ton of complications/problems ppl are facing with UEFI when installing Ubuntu alongside Windows, but I haven't been able to find a solution to the one I encountered.

I have a Windows 8 OS and we installed Ubuntu 12.04 next to it. However, the dual boot menu did not pop up upon reboot. It loaded Windows directly. (Secure boot & rapid technologies are disabled).

After some research & forum reading, we verified that Ubuntu was indeed present in the EFI partition and we ran boot-repair. Eventually, the boot menu appeared, but it did so at every second reboot (from a shutdown not a restart). Then, it disappeared again and the laptop goes directly into Windows.

When the dual boot menu appeared, we went into Ubuntu and life was good so the installation -or some parts of it- worked… But how do i now get the dual boot menu to appear as it's supposed to?

Furthermore, I read that with Windows 8 the dual boot menu becomes graphical… But we just had the regular old list.

Any tips??

Thanks!

Best Answer

As I read it, GRUB isn't appearing at all when you boot; the computer is booting straight into Windows. If so, you probably need to use the Windows bcdedit program from a Command Prompt window started with Administrator privileges:

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} path \EFI\ubuntu\grubx64.efi

Be sure to type that command precisely. Note the difference between slashes (/) and backslashes (\), and note that the curly braces ({bootmgr}) don't denote a variable; type them as-is.

Note also that GRUB is not part of Windows, so its appearance doesn't change with Windows 8. Windows does come with its own boot loader, but AFAIK, on UEFI systems, it's really only useful for selecting between different Windows installations; it can't redirect the boot process to another OS. If you want a graphical boot manager, look into my rEFInd, which can redirect to the Windows boot loader (which will boot Windows directly) or to GRUB (which can boot Linux automatically or present its own menu, depending on its configuration). With 3.3.0 and later kernels, rEFInd can boot them directly, bypassing GRUB; but Ubuntu 12.04 ships with 3.2.0 kernels, so you'll need to upgrade your kernel if you want to use rEFInd without GRUB.

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