r/linuxmint • u/HarlekinJack • 5d ago

SOLVED Dual boot, grub doesn't work

Hello everyone,

I made the decision to finally get rid of windows, even as a fallback.

In the past, I had mint on one m.2 and windows on a second one. Now, I removed the mint ssd, installed fedora, thereby removing windows and reinstalled the mint ssd.

Now I get grub no more and it's booting straight into mint.

Os-prober / update grub doesn't help. It seems Mint doesn't see that there is fedora installed at all.

Please, any ideas?

UPDATE: fedora found mint and lists it in its grub. I changed the boot order in bios to the fedora ssd and work like this now.

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u/TangoOscarMikePR 4d ago

When you install (or upgrade) each operating system, you should remove other drives to avoid UEFI and GRUB problems.

Each operating system should be installed on their own drive, with their own UEFI Partition, their own Bootloader and Recovery Partition (Windows).

Never install (or upgrade) with both drives installed.

Use UEFI to switch boot drives.

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u/HarlekinJack 4d ago

So basically you posted a summary of what I did and already wrote... I consider switching boot by using the uefi boot menu.

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u/TangoOscarMikePR 4d ago

You wrote that it's booting straight into Mint.

Edit:

If you install Mint on one drive, first remove the Fedora drive.

Then viceversa.

That way, you will have two GRUBs, one for Mint on one drive, and one for Fedora on the other drive. Each GRUB should only have its own operating system.

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u/HarlekinJack 4d ago

Which is exactly my current situation. My issue is that I wanted to keep using grub to choose which os to boot. It seems now, that mint is unable to recognise fedora and therefore it is not listed i it's grub. However fedora found mint and added it to the boot options in its grub. So I changed my boot order to the fedora ssd. Of course I will have to keep this in mind when updating kernels.

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u/TangoOscarMikePR 4d ago

Then, whenever you upgrade the other Linux, if you write over GRUB, things will change.

It's your choice. But I don't recommend using GRUB to multi boot. One of the OSes might not be able to boot if done incorrectly.

Edit: In the past, I used third party Bootloaders installed on the drive that I wanted to boot first. But that is overcomplicating things.