Help Fixing Grub Misconfiguration

Question

So I seem to have tied my shoes in a knot.

A couple of months ago, I got another hard drive to install Elementary on. Went through that process, no problem, was still able to access Windows via grub when I needed it.

I had been thinking about checking out another distro, so I made the move to split my SSD into an os partition and a home partition. I gave Elementary too little room and it was causing problems, I couldn't even log in, so I assumed I broke it and decided to reformat the whole drive and install pop_OS!.

For the popos install I manually configured my partitions, and upon restarting I discovered that Windows was not showing up in grub, and I discovered my Windows drive is configured as MBR, and my linux drive is configured as GPT, and I was told that grub can't find both an MBR and GPT OS at the same time.

So I decided to reformat my linux drive to MBR and reinstall Elementary. I did this, however Windows is not showing up and my linux drive is showing as GPT.

My windows drive is sda, and my linux drive is sdf.

If anyone could help me untangle this mess I would appreciate it.

Answer 1

I can recommend you to try Boot Repair application installed after you boot from the live USB/CD. Boot your computer from the live USB, choose "Try elementary OS without installing it". Once you are there, open terminal and update it using

sudo apt update

Once you achieve that, install the software-properties-common in order to add repositories. You can achieve this by

sudo apt install software-properties-common

Then you have to add the following repo and install the boot repair application:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair && sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y boot-repair && boot-repair

You can find more information about this app if you follow this link - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair It saved me a lot of times with one small issue - it will add a lot of useless entries in the bootloader, but you can remove them if you edit /etc/grub.d/40_custom file. Do not forget to backup it before you delete the (menuentries) there. Good luck!