Seven ways to configure multiboot with Windows 8 and Linux

A few days ago a good friend was struggling with his new notebook (which as expected came with UEFI and Windows 8 pre-installed) trying to install Arch in 'dual boot' without succeeding. Right after I deleted the Windows partitions and installed only Arch, I found an article in one of my favorite sites, which explains 7 different ways to configure multiboot on Windows 8 systems.

At the suggestion of this friend, who received the information late, I decided to translate the entire article to make it available to everyone, so that those who cannot read it in its original language have access to his advice, however, as always I recommend to all who have the opportunity, go directly to the original source that will always be richer than any translation.

As preliminary information, the article in question is the last of a series of 3 on the same subject, published by the author in his blog in the place zdnet.com, which I recommend reading in order to those who want to go into details on the matter. About the author of the same, his name is JA Watson and he has an impressive resume that he describes as follows: “I started working with what we call 'analog computers' in aircraft maintenance with the United States Air Force in 1970. After finishing my military service and returning At university, I was introduced to microprocessors and machine language programming on Intel 4040 processors. After that I also worked, managed and programmed equipment from Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8, PDP-11 (/ 45 and / 70) and minicomputers VAX. I was involved with the first wave of Unix-based microcomputers, in the early 80s. I have been working on software development, operation, installation and support ever since.

That said, without further ado, here is the translation of the article in question, on which I emphasize, all the merits belong to the original author and any possible errors are of my own making.

Seven ways to configure multiboot with Windows 8 and Linux

A good part of the comments in my most recent post about installing Fedora on my new laptop was in the sense of “instead of telling us what doesn't work, please give us a little information about the options we have to do the work".

It's good advice, and I'm happy to follow it. If all we do is sit around and complain about the dual boot Linux on systems UEFIWe are very likely to discourage some people from trying it, and the truth is that there are options that work without a huge amount of effort.

First, however, I am going to repeat something that I have said many times before. Each firmware implementation UEFI it's different - and not just a little different, whichever is.

Some work very well with Linux installations, they dual boot smoothly right out of the box. Others are difficult, unpredictable, and downright infuriating in their inconsistency and seem to go out of their way to prevent Linux from booting. So if you want to dual boot Linux and Windows, try to find a description written by someone with the same system you are using, or at least a system from the same manufacturer.

Ok, so what are the chances?

1 . Install the Linux GRUB boot loader

Well, the first and undoubtedly the simplest if it works correctly, is to install the bootloader GRUB Linux as the default boot object, and have control of dual-boot with Windows.

To do this, of course, you have to have a Linux distribution compatible with UEFI - the ones I have tried and can attest to are openSUSE, Fedora, Linux Mint y Ubuntu, but there are others and there is more to come in the near future.

If you have a Linux distribution that supports secure boot UEFI, you don't even have to change the configuration settings UEFI, although many people will choose to disable Secure Boot anyway.

When installing a Linux distribution that supports UEFI, if everything works as it should and the firmware configuration UEFI it works fine and you don't get a bad "reboot" (something I have seen happen too often), so rebooting after full installation will get you the boot menu GRUB, and you will be able to choose between Linux (default) or Windows 8 to boot from it.

At that point you are almost free at home - but keep in mind that I personally have seen (and personally own) systems that at some point later, suddenly reset Windows boot settings for no particular reason. If this happens, you should consider using one of the other methods described below, as my experience has been that this does not happen just once.

2 . Use the BIOS boot select key

The second possibility is that you choose a Linux distribution compatible with UEFI, that the installation is done very well, but when you reboot I get up with Windows instead of Linux. This can be very daunting, but it's actually not that difficult to work with.

The important thing to remember is that the Linux installation has added itself to the startup list - you just have to be able to get to that list to boot.

The easiest way to do this is to use the BIOS option Boot Selection, which is activated by pressing a special key during the power-on or restart process. That 'special key' varies between systems, I've seen Escape, F9 y F12 used on some of my systems, and I'm sure there are others.

Pressing it will interrupt the Windows boot process and you will get a list of available operating systems - probably Windows 8 and Linux. I personally don't pay attention to this option because I don't like to get into the 'rush' with the boot process to make sure I hit the boot select key in time, and if I'm distracted or too slow then I have to go all the way. way through the Windows boot and to simply reboot immediately to return to the boot selection menu.

But this doesn't seem to matter to a lot of people, and it's certainly an option that requires a minimum of fiddling and struggling with rogue BIOS settings. One way this can be made a little easier is to go into BIOS setup and select a startup delay, many systems allow you to set a 5-30 second delay before Windows actually boots, which will give you It gives a lot more time to press the magic key.

3 . Enable 'Legacy Boot'

The third "simple" possibility is to enable 'Legacy Boots'in the BIOS settings and just ignore the whole thing about UEFI.

This is not the option that I personally prefer, partly because I'm stubborn and partly because, as Adam Williamson explained to me some time ago, there are some functional advantages to boot. UEFI. But it's certainly a viable option, and strictly in terms of getting Linux installed and booting, it might actually be the absolute simplest solution.

The only problem I've seen with this option is that some systems make it difficult to enable 'Legacy Boots', either because the option is well hidden in the BIOS setup, or because you have to set a BIOS password before it lets you change it. I've heard there might be some systems that don't count 'Legacy Boots'not at all, but I've never seen one like this.

In any case, choosing this path not only makes things a lot easier for dual boot setup and setup, it allows you to install almost any Linux distribution you want, regardless of compatibility with UEFI.

I have personally used this option to install non-Linux distributions UEFIas solydxk, PCLinuxOS y Linux Mint Debian Edition in a multi-boot configuration with some other UEFI compliant distribution. So I can go back and disable Legacy Boots, and just use the GRUB support UEFI to boot unsupported Linux.

Four . Try using the Windows bootloader

The fourth possibility should be to use the Windows boot loader for a Linux dual boot. I say it should be, because people keep posting comments that say 'just use EasyBCD to configure it ", or even" use bcdedit'But try as I might, I can't get it to work.

I wrote about this a year or so ago when I had my first system UEFI, and I assumed at the time that the problem was just that EasyBCD was not fully adapted to withstand starting UEFI, but now I have tried again, with the latest version of EasyBCD that I could get from the website of NeoSmart and still can't get Linux to boot at all.

Now I may be too dense to find out, but if someone is going to come in and put a comment saying "it works fine", then please be prepared to be very specific, and give exact details of what you did to get it to work. Because I've tried everything I can think of, and no matter what I do, the only thing I get when I try to boot any Linux installation is a "Windows failed to start" message.

I have also searched the web for more information, and the only concrete examples I can find are those who have failed in the same way as me. I can find a lot of places that say «EasyBCD works ", and" use EasyBCD for multiboot Windows 8, 7, Vista, XP, MacOS and Linux ", but not ONE that actually says" we did this with Windows 8 UEFI and Linux, it worked, and this is what you have to do ».

What I did was the following. I downloaded and installed EasyBCD 2.2 on two Windows 8 systems UEFI different (the recently acquired HP Compaq and my Acer Aspire One 725). When then i ran EasyBCD (as an administrator of course) I was surprised that a list of operating systems appeared for your boot configuration. I know the Windows bootloader hadn't been seeing it or offering to boot anything other than Windows 8. It took me a minute to realize that what was listed was all that was in the BIOS boot list.

That was exactly what would be offered if I used the boot selection option, as described above, but if I let Windows boot normally there was no sign of these others. Even if I put a 30 second delay on Windows startup, using bcdedit o EasyBCD, it would stop and only list Windows 8. So why EasyBCD Did it list all the others? I didn't understand, but I was hoping it might be a good sign, that EasyBCDAt least I found the other options, and all I had to do now was add them to the normal Windows bootloader menu.

I tried to do that, first just marking one of the Linux distributions as the default boot object. EasyBCD It lets me do that without any complaints, but when I rebooted I saw that it came back right with Windows. Bah!.

So I tried to use the "Add" option in EasyBCD, and I gave him all the information for one of the Linux partitions. This time at least when I rebooted it showed the Linux option in the boot list, but when I tried to boot it gave me the message "Windows Boot Failed". I yelled at the damn computer that it wasn't even trying to start Windows, so how could it fail, but that didn't help either.

Then I realized that what I was actually establishing EasyBCD it was an attempt to boot something called /NST/neogrub.efi (or something like that, I don't have the exact name in my head right now, and I'm sick of the EasyBCD and Windows, so I'm not going to look at it again).

So I tried to put multiple boot files with that name - at first I tried the grubx64.efi image from one of the Linux distributions, then I tried to copy the boot block (first 512 bytes) from disk and / or system of Linux files, just like it should be done in order to dual boot with Windows XP and Linux, and then I got desperate and just put a Linux kernel under that name. Of course, none of them worked.

I finally decided, based on my own experience and the lack of success stories or actual configuration information on the web, that EasyBCD it is of no use in creating bootable Windows / Linux dual-boot UEFI enabled. It might be possible to use it if it is enabled Legacy Boots, and then set it up exactly the way it was done in Windows XP, but if you're going to do that then just use method three above and you save yourself a ton of trouble.

After struggling with EasyBCD For a long time, and finally giving up, I decided to give the bcdedit utility a try, which is the standard Windows method for this type of configuration. I'm fairly familiar with this program, having used it to set up dual-boot with Windows XP, so I wasn't exactly wandering around awkwardly in the dark.

But then again, no matter what I've tried, it won't boot. I could get the Linux item added to the Windows bootloader menu, and I could set all sorts of different things as the boot object, but none of them worked. Lastly, just to prove to myself that I wasn't doing just something fundamentally wrong (or stupid), I set the boot object for one of my Linux attempts to be Windows 8 and it booted up right away. Grrrr !.

So my conclusion from all of this is that, one of the main reasons why EasyBCD it has no use in creating a Linux dual boot, it is basically impossible to use the Windows 8 bootloader to boot Linux with boot UEFI enabled. Again, it might be possible with Legacy Boot enabled, but I don't care enough at this point to find out.

If you know I'm wrong on this, and have personally configured a Windows 8 system to boot Linux using the Windows bootloader, then tell me in the comments, and please, please be specific and tell how you did it, because I'd love to know.

5 . Install a different bootloader

The fifth multiboot option UEFI is to install a different bootloader, like rEFInd by Roderick W. Smith. This has the advantage of being able to boot almost anything - Windows, Linux, MacOS - and is very powerful and very flexible in automatically searching for what might be on the disk, presenting it as a boot selection list.

Unfortunately, the only thing it doesn't solve is the "uncooperative / unpredictable BIOS setup" issue described above. If Windows or the boot process, or something else is messing with the BIOS settings and preventing you from permanently setting GRUB as the default bootloader, then it will almost certainly prevent the setting of rEFInd.

6. Try a temporary alternative

The sixth option is not exactly a solution to the BIOS uncooperative / unpredictable configuration problem, it is rather an ugly temporary workaround for it.

Turns out, in addition to the normal "boot sequence" list in the boot configuration UEFIThere is also a "next boot" option, which specifies a one-time boot configuration.

This is normally null, so the system follows the boot sequence list, but if it is set, the system will try to boot that item first, and it is also evident that it is set so that the next boot returns to the use of default boot sequence list.

Next boot settings can be adjusted desde Linux using efibootmgr -n XXXX, where XXXX is the boot list item number, to find out the Linux installation number (s), just use efibootmgr with no options (or efibootmgr -v if you want to see all the explicit details) - The number will be something like 0001 or 0002 in most cases.

This "next boot" option could be turned into a semi-permanent job by adding the efibootmgr command to the Linux boot scripts, so every time Linux boots it would be reset so it would boot Linux again the next time. once. I didn't say it was cool, or elegant, or even pretty, but it works, because I have tried.

7. Cheat the default boot process

Finally, the seventh option is to "cheat" the default boot process by putting the shim.efi Linux image (or grubx64.efi if you disable Secure Boot) where the Windows Boot Manager is normally located.

On systems I have tested, this is on the boot partition EFI (typically / dev / sda2 on Linux, mounted as / boot / efi), under the name /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/Bootmgfw.efi. I have had some success in doing this, but I warn you that some systems (especially HP Compaq) are so aggressive about checking and resetting the boot configuration UEFI By default they sometimes realize that Bootmgfw.efi is not actually the "original" program installed, and it gets a copy of the original and puts it back in its place, thus undoing the cunning deception. You can probably imagine how irritating and frustrating it is when this happens ...

So there you have it. Seven different options for configuring multiboot with Windows 8 and Linux.

I suppose there are others that I have not thought about, or that I am not remembering at the moment, but these are the ones that I think are the most obvious.

I have tried all of them at one point or another. The most beautiful and of course the simplest is the first one, you just have to install and boot GRUB, if it works on your particular system. I also know that some people swear that the second option is enough, just by pressing Select Boot, and that they think I'm being lazy and stubborn by not using that one.

Beyond those two, it would probably take more dedication, learning, and trial and error to get the others to work (some I haven't gotten to work yet). But in the long run, if you're determined to dual boot Linux and Windows, you should be able to do it.

Well, so far the translation of the original article, I hope it helps those who have a similar problem ...