0

I was trying to upgrade the video card on my dual boot workstation and it stopped booting -- no grub menu, nothing. Windows was the original OS, Ubuntu came after. I put an Ubuntu 20.04 live CD in it and ran the boot-repair instructions per the second option. I'm quite grateful that the machine now boots Ubuntu, but there's no grub menu. If I hit the shift key, I can see a grub menu but there's no windows option at all.

Here is my boot-repair pastebin: https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/kYR8MsgB4Y/

I think the Windows 10 installation is on sda.

Can anyone tell me how I can get the Windows 10 boot option back? It would be a real downer to have to reinstall the OS -- and I'd likely lose a lot of old software that is very useful to me.

EDIT: Thanks to Eric^^ in #ubuntu IRC, we have tried to get to the bottom of this. It would appear that something wiped the windows partition or something at some point (was this boot-repair???). There appear to be vestiges of numerous now-defunct partitions on the drive. I had repartitioned it quite a few times, and never really filled it up enough to over write the sectors. The TestDisk output tells a pretty sordid story, but doesn't give any indications what might have wiped the boot or killed all the data.

S. Imp
  • 171
  • sudo update-grub? – Irsu85 Apr 22 '21 at 07:14
  • @lrsu85 i've tried that, but nothing happens. Here is the response from that command. – S. Imp Apr 22 '21 at 07:18
  • Turn off Windows hibernation. http://askubuntu.com/questions/843153/ubuntu-16-showing-windows-10-partitions & https://askubuntu.com/questions/145902/unable-to-mount-windows-ntfs-filesystem-due-to-hibernation Then boot Ubuntu & run sudo update-grub – oldfred Apr 22 '21 at 12:51
  • @oldfred You seem to have overlooked the part where I can't even find the windows boot to start it up in windows. – S. Imp Apr 22 '21 at 14:06
  • 1
    Now we are into Windows repairs. I do not know them well any more. You need to restore a Windows boot loader to MBR of Windows drive, to boot in BIOS mode. Since old BIOS type installs, you must always have both Windows repair/recovery flash drive and Ubuntu live installer. Keep Windows boot loader on Windows drive and have grub on other drives. New Windows really works better with UEFI which Microsoft has required vendors to install in UEFI boot mode since 2012. Old BIOS mode will work, but requires more effort. – oldfred Apr 22 '21 at 19:43
  • @oldfred yes the UEFI thing seems to be a complication. it looks like something at some point wiped the partition with a FAT32 partition. TestDisk output of the windows drive is pretty ugly. I had adjusted the partitions numerous times, while never really using much of the drive. – S. Imp Apr 23 '21 at 00:14

0 Answers0