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I've been pulling my hair out the past couple of days trying to access my installed Ubuntu.

Here is what happened: I wanted to create a dual boot of windows 8 and Ubuntu 14.04. So I downloaded an Ubuntu Distro onto a usb drive, and installed it from said usb drive.

Everything was fine. Ubuntu was working flawlessly.

A couple of hours later, I went to shut down my pc. When I clicked on the shutdown button in Ubuntu, the computer froze. I was able to move the mouse around, but I couldn't select anything. I ended up having to just hold the power button in till the pc shut off.

I then went to power on the pc to make sure nothing was adversely effected, and it booted me directly into windows 8.

I found out how to access my windows boot menu, and attempted to go in and boot back into Ubuntu. The problem is, there is no Ubuntu entry in my windows boot menu.

I have went as far as to try booting into "try Ubuntu" from the usb drive and running boot repair. It didn't pop out any errors, so I went back into the windows boot menu expecting there to now be an Ubuntu entry, but there is still none. Then I went into the windows boot menu and turned off secure boot, and reattempted the boot repair, still nothing. So basically now I have Ubuntu installed somewhere on my pc, and I can't figure out how to access it!

I should also mention that this Ubuntu installation was over a preinstalled windows 8.

I'm stuck dead in the water here, and I need to figure this out.

Please help!

P.s. I am a brand new Ubuntu user, so this is especially confusing to me.

RandomHero
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1 Answers1

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After a dual boot install, the Ubuntu boot menu is used. It is called Grub and will allow you to choose which OS to boot right at startup.

Installing Ubuntu on a Pre-Installed Windows 8 (64-bit) System (UEFI Supported)

Here is an excerpt from the above question's top answer:

YOUR COMPUTER BOOTS DIRECTLY TO WINDOWS

This is a common problem and if you do not get a GRUB menu , re-installing or repairing grub will NOT HELP

Every BIOS is different, it might look like one of the following pictures:

UEFI 1

UEFI 2

Notice the "UEFI Boot Option Priority" or "Boot Option Menu" . Usually Windows is the default and Ubuntu (or as in the second picture elementary OS) will be an option.

Once you select Ubuntu on the UEFI boot menu you will then get a grub menu. You should be able to boot either Ubuntu or Windows from the grub menu.

Another issue that could make the system boot directly to Windows (without even showing the GRUB menu) is if either Windows took hold of the boot manager or after installing Ubuntu, the EFI partition was not properly configured for Windows. To solve this, simply go to Windows and open a terminal, then type the following (Need Administrative Privileges):

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} path \EFI\ubuntu\grubx64.efi This will configure the Windows Boot Manager to take into consideration the GRUB Boot Manager. This could still happen even after running the Boot Repair from within Ubuntu. So making sure that Windows reads the Ubuntu EFI partition will solve it.

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Steelsouls
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  • I seem to remember in all my searching for a solution the option you mentioned of getting into the windows terminal and running bcdedit. I will try this as soon as I get back to my computer later on and report my findings. Thanks for the help! – RandomHero Mar 29 '15 at 12:54
  • None of the suggestions worked. However, I ended up just moving my important windows data onto a flash drive and just reinstalled ubuntu -and chose to wipe windows- that's the end of that problem :D – RandomHero Mar 30 '15 at 01:53