Hi all,

For a while, windows 8.1 have been living side by side with Fedora 23 on my Lenovo Yoga 2 pro laptop. Grub (EFI mode) was in charge of the boot, allowing me to select between Fedora and Windows.
One day, Window has decided to upgrade itself to version 10 (WITHOUT my confirmation, how rude!).
Even since installation was done, I'm unable to boot into fedora. Powering up the laptop, I get an error "Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported...." with the "grub>" prompt. Typing "exit", I get the built-in laptop boot menu selection, where I can select "Windows Boot manager" - which brings up Windows 10, or "Fedora" which brings back the grub menu.
I can boot the laptop with a live CD, but I am not sure how to run grub-mkconfig in this configuration.

Appreciate any help you can provide.
Thanks.

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One day, Window has decided to upgrade itself to version 10 (WITHOUT my confirmation, how rude!). Even since installation was done, I'm unable to boot into fedora. Powering up the laptop, I get an error "Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported...." with the "grub>" prompt. Typing "exit", I get the built-in laptop boot menu selection, where I can select "Windows Boot manager" - which brings up Windows 10, or "Fedora" which brings back the grub menu.

M$ Window 10 is designed to deny dual booting with Linux OS's. You can disable the Secure Boot only via Window 10 running(!) first. However the UEFI can easily manage dual booting (with Linux) if only Windows 7 (easy) or Windows 8 (some workaround) is present.

Quote:

I can boot the laptop with a live CD, but I am not sure how to run grub-mkconfig in this configuration.

I have tried switch off secure boot at windows 10 but ridiculously the machine will not boot to the HDD anymore, except to DVD drive and only that. I have recently bought two units (netbook & laptop) each with windows 10 pre-installed, I gave up, it was time wasting for me to hack only for microsoft foolishness --I returned the units to the seller, I did not waste time installing either 8 or 7.

If you can downgrade to windows 7 you can still dual boot with ease. Or if you can do away with it stop dual booting with microsoft windows. Young linux users have that consternation to abandon an old practice, but it pays to jump into the water once and learn to swim sooner. You have good helpers in LQ

Hope that helps.

m.m

Hello,

Please don't be discouraged. There surely is a workaround. I recently bought an HP Pavilion. It had Windows 8.1 and I installed Slackware 14.1 side-by-side. I upgraded to Windows 10 two weeks ago and luckily everything continued to work fine. This is because Windows upgraded its boot loader found on the EFI partition (/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi) but, LUCKILY, didn't touch the /EFI/grub/bootx64.efi found there.

For Fedora, I learnt that it is a little more complicated as Fedora places several other files in addition to the efi binary.

Since the grub command line shows up, it probably means that grub is still found there and is working. So, you can try to repair your grub.cfg by chrooting into your fedora installation from the live CD and run grub-mkconfig:

Boot your live CD and create a mount point for your Fedora partition and mount it:

You should replace TYPE by the type of filesystem you have on your Fedora partition (e.g. ext3, ext4 ...). And you should replace the X (in /dev/sdaX) by the correct partition number. Then, mount the EFI partition at /mnt/fedora/boot

Again, you will have to replace the Y in /dev/sdaY with the correct number corresponding to your EFI partition's number.

Then, chroot into the /mnt/fedora, which will become your new /, where you can run grub-mkconfig and other commands to repair the grub, just as if you had booted into your Fedora.

All the best.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi,

aragorn2101, thank you so much for you reply. I managed to solved this issue, slightly different than what you described.

After loading from liveCD and mounting the two partitions like you described, I failed to run the chroot command. It reported error on "+h", treating it as a file which doesn't exist.
I looked into /mnt/fedora/boot/efi/EFI/fedora/ to find that grub.cfg is corrupted, and luckily I found a grub.cfg.backup which I previously created when playing with windows 8.1 dual boot.
Renamed the backup instead of grub.cfg and that solved it. Now I can boot into both Windows 10 and Fedora 23.

Thanks!!

My computer is now running Fedora 23 side by side with Windows 10, so indeed this can be done.

Very glad to help.

I would just like to mention that the "+h" in the chroot command was to disable hashing. We could as well omit it.

Anyway, enjoy your dual boot.

Cheers.