Hi, I installed Mageia 5 on a partition on the HDD that also contains window. I elected to have win as the default login. When I boot the grub menu does not appear and the system boots straight to windows so I cant access Mageia. Any ideas to help me here. Thanks. Ian

Dear sdrambo,
Some suggestions:
a) look in Windws if your linux is somewhere as a partition
b) use your installation of Mageia as a Live-CD/DVD or a LIve-USB to access to your Linux partition (see how to use a Live Linux installation searchin in your browser for this topic)

It mught be that at the time of the installing one of the questions is :
do you want to install grub in MBR? You might answer no, therefore your linux is installed, but you need GRUB to get to your installed LInux,.


Regards,
M.

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Several possibilities here.

1. MBR installation, timeout is too short in grub.cfg.
Temporary Solution: Boot from live medium, change timeouts to something longer (I use 65).
Permanent Solution: Set GRUB_TIMEOUT in /etc/default/grub and run update-grub (not sure of the Mageia equivalent)

2. You installed grub to the Mageia partition, not the hard drive of a MBR-type system.
Solution: Boot from live medium, chroot to Mageia, execute (Mageia equivalent) of grub-install /dev/sdX where X is the boot drive of your system. Reboot from HDD

3. You did a UEFI install (typically on a Win 8 or WIn 10 system).
Solution: Even with grub properly installed, you won't see it unless you can get to the bootloader options page (on one laptop, that means pressing ESC repeatedly when powering on; on another, it's pressing F9 repeatedly).

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