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Since installing Ubuntu 16.04 as a dual-boot setup with Windows 10 I'm having frequent blue screens of death in Windows (about 5 per day).

All the error codes are related to a problem in Windows kernel.

Error: KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED
file path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\ntoskrnl.exe

The problem occurs only when I boot Windows from GRUB. If I boot Windows directly through the UEFI boot menu, I get no BSODs.

I've read that Ubuntu can put some hardware into a specific physical state and Windows then can't properly access it, and a cold reboot is required.

So my question is: does GRUB have the capability to temporarily corrupt hardware?

Zanna
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Jakub Jun
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  • Good question, but "does GRUB have the capability to temporarily corrupt hardware" is INCORRECT. Software cannot "corrupt" hardware. It can destroy data, it could even mark a sector as corrupt, but it can't physically corrupt it. You're probably asking something more along the lines of "Does GRUB affect the booting of Windows 10" or "Why do BSOD's occur when I boot with GRUB?" Please [edit] your question to provide a more accurate question. – fosslinux Mar 27 '18 at 00:21
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    @ubashu: It's pretty easy to turn some computers into bricks if you delete or overwrite the (EFI) BIOS or other firmware with software. – David Foerster Mar 27 '18 at 01:30
  • @ubashu Windows has the power to "turn off" hardware such that when Ubuntu warm reboots from Windows that network card or whatever Windows powered off no longer works. In this case a cold reboot is needed. So yes in an indirect way software can corrupt hardware. However that doesn't answer this question. – WinEunuuchs2Unix Mar 27 '18 at 02:36
  • @WinEunuuchs2Unix Good point, but I was under the impression that this dosen't "corrupt" hardware. My understanding of corruption is that it permenantly damages the hardware. eg Sector made unusable on hard disk due to corruption. – fosslinux Mar 27 '18 at 02:38
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    @ubashu It gets down to semantics. If we say it is "corrupt" we might mean it is "broken". If Windows has turned a piece of hardware off using software it appears "broken" and some might call it "corrupt" by mistake. Either way we can simply say something doesn't work the way it should. – WinEunuuchs2Unix Mar 27 '18 at 02:44

2 Answers2

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Grub can only make use of the UEFI bios to read the system from the disk to boot it, just like the Windows UEFI boot loader does. I'm not sure if the Windows boot loader bothers to make use of the graphics services provided by the UEFI bios, but grub does ( to display the menu ); so it is possible that your UEFI bios leaves the graphics hardware in some state that the Windows driver isn't happy with, and if the Windows UEFI loader does not bother using the graphics, that could explain the difference in behavior.

psusi
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I used this script: How to display grub menu and options without booting? to look at the Windows boot options used by grub:

menuentry 'Windows Boot Manager (on /dev/nvme0n1p2)' --class windows --class os $menuentry_id_option 'osprober-efi-D656-F2A8' {
savedefault
insmod part_gpt
insmod fat
if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root D656-F2A8
else
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root D656-F2A8
fi
chainloader /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
}
Press <Enter> to continue

Using a similar program or manually viewing /boot/grub/grub.cfg check what .efi program is being loaded on your system. Them compare it to the version that is being used in your BIOS boot up. If different try running boot-repair on grub to fix.

WinEunuuchs2Unix
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