A few days ago I decided to reformat my desktop PC for various reasons, and set up a Windows 8 and Opensuse 13.1 dual boot. When I had this setup before, I used Easy BCD to allow the windows boot loader to load Opensuse. I didn’t like the way that setup worked, so I wanted to do it the better way this time and use Grub2 as the boot loader, which seemed to work fine. I could dual boot into both systems.
However, there were security updates in Windows 8 that I just could not get to install no matter what I tried. I was also unable to update it to Windows 8.1 through the store.
Finally I reinstalled the Windows boot loader, and the updates were able to install. I had to go out of town now and am away from my desktop, so I didn’t get a chance to try the Windows 8.1 upgrade yet, but I suspect it should work fine as well.
As much as I’d love to ditch Windows completely, I can’t. At least not yet.
Searching the internet just leads me to a lot of threads about people who can’t get the dual boot part working, which for me wasn’t a problem. My machine is a bit older.
So, has anyone else encountered this problem and found a way to fix it? I set my boot loader to load from MBR, but should I have set it up differently?
Here’s a bit of info that I can remember.
Motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-970A-D3. I had installed Windows 8 first as a primary partition. Then I used GParted to shrink the partition down, created an extended partition for Opensuse 13.1, and installed it with the boot loader set to boot from the MBR. I had also installed a 512mb boot partition.
I really hope there’s a way to use GRUB2 as my boot loader and have both systems work smoothly.
When Windows is installing updates that affect its booting, it tries to check out everything. And if you are setup for grub2 to handle the booting, it won’t check out and Windows will back out that update.
My solution was to use the Windows boot manager to boot linux – about what you were doing with EasyBCD. But I could then set the active partition to the linux partition and I would boot with grub2 alone. If I am having problems with a Windows update, I set the active partition back to Windows, and install the update. I can revert to boot with grub2 at a later time.
On 2013-12-16 16:26, oapeter wrote:
>
> Hello!
>
> That sounds like a good idea. So you install Grub to a /boot partition,
> and just set that partition as active with diskpart in Windows?
Right.
I have Windows 7, and openSUSE. I take care that the master boot record
(MBR) is the original of the machine, never grub. The extended partition
is marked as bootable, grub is there, and /boot is a logical partition.
If Windows complain, I set back the first windows partition as bootable;
I do the updates, and then undo the marking with any Linux rescue cd.
Alternatively, I could use EasyBCD, but last I heard is that it did not
work with Windows 8.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)
This is how I’ll set it up when I get back home. I didn’t want to use EasyBCD again, and Grub2 boots the machine much faster than the way EasyBCD had set it up.
And yes, EasyBCD worked well for my non-UEFI system, aside from it having to reboot when I picked a system other than Windows.
On 2013-12-16 17:46, oapeter wrote:
> And yes, EasyBCD worked well for my non-UEFI system, aside from it
> having to reboot when I picked a system other than Windows.
I don’t remember that.
I got a very simple, ugly, text menu at boot, where I could choose which
system to boot.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)
This unfortunately has high chances to break when grub2 is updated. My be allowing to specify boot sector device and device to embed core.img separately could be a solution …
Note I could be wrong with Win8. In most cases Windows only check the boot flag (except for ver upgrades) so If you put grub in MBR and set the boot flag to Windows most updates should work.
I refuse to dance to MS’s tune so I only run Windows from a VM This works great as long as you don’t want high end MS games.
Indeed, that has been a problem. It worked well with grub1, which rarely updated anything other than “menu.lst”.
So now I mostly use grub for booting. I switch to Windows for special use (major Windows service packs), and update the boot sector file that Windows uses, so that from there I can easily get back to grub2/linux via Windows boot manager. And then I can switch the active bit back to grub until the next service pack.
> I refuse to dance to MS’s tune so I only run Windows from a VM This
> works great as long as you don’t want high end MS games.
The reason I use Windows some times is to maintain and upgrade certain
gadgets, like cell phone, car navigation system… Well, one of these
gadgets refused to connect to Windows on a virtual machine, it had to be
a real one.
It is funny that several of these gadgets are Linux inside, yet they
only work with Windows proprietary software for management.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)
Yep, the biggest reason I need to keep Windows around is to play games. I’m also in college, but we’ll be using a VMWare Virtual Machine that gets installed on my laptop next term. I’ll be learning .NET programming so I guess Windows is going to be hard to get away from for that.
Since I switched the bootloader back to Windows, how do I get Grub2 back without having to reinstall OpenSUSE? Do I use the live USB I have and run “grub2-mkconfig -o /path/to/boot/folder”, then reboot into Windows and set it as active with Diskpart as already discussed?
If you installed opensuse to boot from a partition, then just set that partition to active and you should get back to the grub menu.
If you really need to reinstall grub2 from a live media boot, then you will have to mount the root file system that you want to fix (usually as “/mnt”), do other mounts, then “chroot” into the mounted system to reinstall.
There should be a forum article or wiki page on the procedure.