Dual boot vagary
I’ve followed your past few Ubuntu features, as well as the elementaryOSbased 60-minute Crash Course in
LXF234. In all of these, you tend to brush over dual-booting, citing Ubuntu’s ability to happily install alongside other OSes. However, this has not been my experience, and continued to not be my experience when I attempted to install 18.04 over the weekend.
I have a UEFI Windows install, with secure boot turned off, and wanted to install Ubuntu on a separate SSD drive. I thought this should be pretty straightforward, not having to worry about resizing or moving the Windows partitions, but apparently not.
I chose the “Something else” option from the installer and asked for GRUB to be installed to the Windows drive (/ dev/
sda), presuming that it would use the EFI partition there, since I set that partition (/ dev/sda2) to be mounted at /boot/
EFI. The installation proceeded, and my Windows install was thankfully left intact, but there was no option to boot Ubuntu from the UEFI menu.
I tried to reinstall, but the same thing happened. I couldn’t see what I was doing wrong and so there wasn’t anything I could change. In the end I opted to install GRUB on the other drive, and everything worked fine, except now I have to change my boot device in the UEFI settings whenever I want to change OSes.
I’d love to use Linux full time, but sadly the applications that I rely on for work prevent this, and furthermore having to frequently change the boot setting is inconvenient. Jameel Noor, by carrier pigeon
AThe dual boot situation is an unfortunate one, and I admit it’s a bit of a cop out to use phrases such as “it should work fine” (even though it really should). It’s a shame because I think a lot of people get scuppered at the installation step and give up on Linux. Even though they would probably get on fine with it, but for this not working or being confusing.
The problem is everyone’s hardware is different, people often have exotic partition set ups (sometimes without knowing it), and everyone’s UEFI implementations are different (some are incredibly buggy). It sounds like you did everything right in the installer, and so a dodgy UEFI is the easiest explanation here. Perhaps it’ll be fixed with a firmware update. You should (there’s that tricksy word again) be able to chainload Windows from the Ubuntu GRUB menu though – it’s more than capable of looking at other drives, but you may have to create this entry if not. Once you’ve figured it out, you should add an entry to /etc/grub.d/ so that it’s not lost every time the GRUB menu is regenerated.