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Last year I got a Dell G3 15 laptop with Ubuntu 20.04 and Windows 10 for work. A few months later there was a problem with the motherboard and was basically unusable. From Dell's customer support I got a replacement (it had only W10), but decided to keep the old drives for my files, software and credentials, they are a NVME M.2 and a HDD in RAID configuration. In addition to installing the old drives in the new laptop, I changed the graphics driver to the Nouveau display driver, because the old one had a Nvidia 1650 Ti, and the new one a NV167 / Mesa Intel® UHD Graphics (CML GT2).

After I made the drives change, I can't see the GRUB screen and it boots directly to Ubuntu. I tried to repair the grub according to this tutorial, but although I could see the grub when booting from the live USB, it wasn't showing an option for Window 10, and didn't see grub again after removing the live USB.

According to efibootmgr, the first boot option is the volume where Ubuntu (and the shimx64.efi) is installed, and fdisk tells me there are two Windows 10-related volumes ("Microsoft reserved" and "Microsoft basic data") in addition to the Ubuntu and the EFI volumes.

I tried some suggestions online but with no success. Can somebody help me so it can work as it's supposed to?

  • Probably a case of Windows installed in Legacy mode. – ChanganAuto Oct 11 '21 at 20:21
  • Ubuntu 18? No such release, so this is a Ubuntu Core 18 install? (ie. snap only release intended for appliance/device server usage; Ubuntu uses the year.month format for standard deb based products, year for snap only products) – guiverc Oct 11 '21 at 21:10
  • Any update to UEFI or change in motherboard would reset UEFI settings to defaults. You may need to change those & Dell typically needs several. And Windows fast start up would be on. If in UEFI mode as it should be, then can you not boot Windows directly from UEFI boot menu (f12)? – oldfred Oct 11 '21 at 21:24
  • @guiverc My bad, I just double checked and it has currently Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS. I seem to recall there was some update and thought it had a previous version before. – Felipe Brubeck Oct 12 '21 at 01:07
  • @oldfred I can't boot to Windows from the UEFI menu. If I select any of the boot options that are supposed to take me to windows, a blue screen appears with the options "Reset system", "Continue boot" and "Always continue boot". I select "Continue boot" and it takes me to Ubuntu. Does this mean that the Windows installation is damaged? – Felipe Brubeck Oct 12 '21 at 01:30
  • Do not know Windows issues and this is an Ubuntu question & answer site. If Windows is broken, then not really related to Ubuntu. Better to ask on a Windows support site or https://superuser.com/ Grub only boots working Windows installed in the same boot mode. But if UEFI, it should directly boot Windows. https://askubuntu.com/questions/217904/unable-to-boot-into-windows-after-installing-ubuntu-how-to-fix – oldfred Oct 12 '21 at 02:36

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