Dual-boot problems with Windows 10

Hi - I have dual-booted my Acer E5-571 laptop with Leap 15.1 and Windows 10. All went well with the installations and both systems work well…except…Windows 10 will not sleep or shutdown correctly. Yes, I know this has been dealt with before, but bear with me.

I followed the actions to remedy this as follows:

[INDENT=2]In an admin command prompt in Win 10, I entered ‘Powercfg /hibernate on’. This seemed to cure the sleep/shutdown problem in Windows.[/INDENT]

However, when I then tried to boot Linux, after a few seconds a rescue command prompt appeared and that was the end of the boot. I went back to Windows and disabled hibernate (Powercfg /hibernate off); Linux then booted correctly - but I was back to Windows 10 not sleeping or shutting down.

Lots of people over the years on various forums have said that this is a Windows problem. I don’t think this is so because if I alter the boot order in BIOS to boot straight into Windows, it doesn’t have a problem with either sleep or shutting down, even with hibernate switched off. Soooo, I either can’t switch off Windows or I can’t boot Linux.

Any ideas, please?

Yes, Windows likes to hibernate even when you tell it to shutdown.

So I turned off “fast boot” in Windows 8.1. But I still could not mount Windows drives in linux. I had to disable hibernation for that.

But I have since learned that you can force Windows to shutdown completely, but pressing the SHIFT key while clicking “restart”. I now always shutdown that way. But I’ll admit that I did not turn hibernation back on, so I haven’t fully tested this.

How are you trying to get Windows 10 to sleep or shutdown? Different hardware / BIOS combinations offer different ways to do these tasks: a dedicated button, Fn+F4, close the lid, …

Check the settings in Win 10 power options; see Shut down, sleep, or hibernate your PC - Microsoft Support

You do want hibernate off, but need a proper power option for sleeping.

If you want to switch from Win10 to Linux, do a restart command, not shutdown. That causes Win10 to skip hibernation.

Well, that works - pressing SHIFT while either shutting down or entering sleep mode is the ‘answer’. How strange. Have you any idea why that works? And thanks very much for the solution, by the way!

That is a “feature” that Microsoft has built into recent Windows.

Thanks for confirming that this works for you.

Others have explained only half what I believe is a two part problem. I expect the other half is that openSUSE’s fstab is trying to mount Windows’ filesystem(s) unconditionally. If nofail is added as an option for any NTFS partitions in fstab, Windows left in hiberation mode shouldn’t put openSUSE in rescue mode, though booted thus it won’t won’t provide access to NTFS filesystems.