Problem dual booting Mint 22

[Bookmem]

I'm trying to dual boot Win 11 and Mint 22 on an HP Elitebook 745 laptop. I installed Win 11 first and turned off fastboot and deleted recovery partition. Booted Mint 22 and chose the "along side Windows" option when installing Mint so that it would create the EFI partition. But I can't get it to show the Grub Menu. It just boots to Mint. I've tried update-grub and even reinstalling grub but it still just boots to Mint. What am I doing wrong???  

[glenn4uk]

I'm not a Mint user so I don't know specifics but you will want Mint to install its bootloader (presumably Grub) into the same EFI partition that Windows created.  It looks like you had Mint create a separate or new EFI.

[Bookmem]

3 hours ago, glenn4uk said:

I'm not a Mint user so I don't know specifics but you will want Mint to install its bootloader (presumably Grub) into the same EFI partition that Windows created.  It looks like you had Mint create a separate or new EFI.

In the past I always chose "somthing else" and grub would just install to SDA. But when I tried this with Mint 22, I got a warning that I wouldn't be able to boot without an EFI file. I went ahead and did that anyway, but, again, no grub menu. So I started over and installed "along side Windows". That didn't work either. .And when I try to reinstall grub to the Window EFI partition, it won't do it because that is an NTFS partition.

edit: I used supergrub iso to boot windows, installed EasyBCD, added Mint to its menu and can now boot to both. But I'd still like to know what's going on with Mint that makes dual booting it a PITA. It was never a problem till they "upgraded".

Edited July 28, 2024 by Bookmem

[glenn4uk]

Not sure you have the EFI partition identified correctly because EFI has to be formatted as FAT.

[Bookmem]

1 hour ago, glenn4uk said:

Not sure you have the EFI partition identified correctly because EFI has to be formatted as FAT.

 

1 hour ago, glenn4uk said:

Not sure you have the EFI partition identified correctly because EFI has to be formatted as FAT.

AFAIK, it should always be SDA1 with a clean install of Win11.

[raymac46]

Sound like you may have solved your problem but this site has some helpful tips:

 

https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/install-mint.html

 

[Bookmem]

17 hours ago, raymac46 said:

Sound like you may have solved your problem but this site has some helpful tips:

 

https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/install-mint.html

 

That article assumed UEFI and I installed Windows with MBR in legacy mode. So to test if the instructions in the article would work, I started from scratch. I booted the Mint iso and used gparted to delete all of the partitions and switch the drive from MBR to GPT. Then used Rufus to reflash my Windows 11 USB stick with GPT instead of MBR and installed Window in UEFI mode instead of Legacy. Then I installed Mint "along side Windows" and sure enough it then booted directly to Windows instead of Mint. So I booted to BIOS and put "OS Manager" as the first boot option. But it didn't help. It still boots directly to Windows. So I then used the ESC key when booting and F9 for boot options. One of the option was "ubuntu" and that option does bring up the grub menu. The problem is that "ubuntu" doesn't appear was one of the boot options in the BIOS setup. Went to HP support and downloaded and install the latest BIOS firmware but that didn't help. If I were building this for myself, this wouldn't bother me. But I'm trying to build it to sell as a "Window plus Linux" laptop.

Edited July 29, 2024 by Bookmem

[raymac46]

Sometimes you can use rEFInd instead of Grub to multi-boot. I am no expert but it might be worth a try,

https://teejeetech.com/2020/09/05/linux-multi-boot-with-refind/

[Bookmem]

On 7/29/2024 at 5:30 PM, raymac46 said:

Sometimes you can use rEFInd instead of Grub to multi-boot. I am no expert but it might be worth a try,

https://teejeetech.com/2020/09/05/linux-multi-boot-with-refind/

Thanks for the link but I finally gave up on the dual boot and put Mint 22 in Vbox session. I figure that is really a better idea for selling the laptop because there is no need to reboot to switch back and forth from Windows to Linux.

[raymac46]

Sounds like a good plan. I have given up on dual booting and just put Linux on old laptops which aren't really designed to run Windows 11.