Hi,
On my daughters laptop with windows I installed manjaro xfce for her to try out. The partitions are mbr.
After a windows 10 update the windows system will not boot.
1 in 3 times I can reach windows boot menu by using "sendkey F8" in grub other times it just shows something totally distorted.
grub and linux are fine.

Now I'm wondering is it safe to use dual boot, I mean will this likely happen again?
What can be the cause of this problem?
Is it possible to fix the problem?

The problem is caused by Microsoft's attempts to make it impossible to run any operating system other than Windows on a PC.


Microsoft's idea of fixing the problem is to continue tightening the restrictions against other operating systems until all of the various workarounds that people have come up with no longer work.

I do not dual boot, but my idea of dual booting would be to have all desired bootloaders in EFI partition without interfering with each other and choosing between them using built-in UEFI boot menu. I would not use a third party bootloader such as Grub2 to boot all installed operating systems.

Who installed windows 10? It is extremely unusual for windows 8 and later to be installed in MBR mode. Are Manjaro and windows on the same disk? Is Manjaro installed in Legacy(MBR) mode? Who is the manufacturer and how old is the computer, some hardware specs would be useful. How long did the dual boot function. UEFI installs limit the likelihood of something like this happening and generally the problem is the reverse, windows updates preventing Linux booting.

Since your Linux boots and windows does not and the update was on windows, have you tried posting at a windows forum?

I'm guessing this was an update from Windows 7 which was commonly installed on MBR systems. On one of my old boxes that had Windows 7 installed in mbr legacy bios mode, the free Windows 10 "upgrade" left that intact and did not convert to gpt/uefi. If that's the case, and he can successfully boot into Manjaro, I would suggest trying to update grub from within Manjaro. Not sure how to do that on Arch based systems, but the Arch wiki can probably guide you through the process or someone here who runs Arch can probably tell you.

Hi all.
I bought a refurbished dell latitude 5480 for my daughter 6 month ago. it is 7000 series intel processor so it is quite old.
The refurbishing company put a 128Gb ssd in it with mbr partition table and windows 10 preinstalled.

How I fixed windows:
So now I have a working windows 10 but can not boot into linux.
Does anyone have suggestions on how to not end up with a broken linux/windows again, i.e. is there a safer way to dual boot?

@Emerson
I have never heard about this. A fast google did not find any info of it other than using rEFInd, which seems more like an alternative to grub.
Could you elaborate or point me to a guide on how to do this?

First things first - do a windows update. Just to be sure everything is (now) in place and works ok. Should be ok - the OEM installs were a bit of a kludge in my experience.

On a Dell, you should be able to get to the firmware boot menu using F12 when you restart the machine. Be quick, when the screen is black. See if your Manjaro is listed there, and select it if so.

Since manjaro was installed in Legacy/MBR mode and you have now installed windows in EFI mode, you need to install Grub in EFI mode by booting the Manjaro USB in UEFI mode in the BIOS boot options and reinstall Grub. I don't use Manjaro so I'm not familiar with it but the link below describes reinstalling Grub in EFI mode from the installer USB. Best to read through the page before beginning so you understand the process.

https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/G...RUB_Bootloader