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I have a work laptop that had an encrypted partition with Windows 7 and I wanted to dual boot it with Loki. I installed Loki, but during the installation process it told me that I couldn't install it with UEFI without damaging the MBR or something or another, I can't recall. So I went back and partitioned it manually by shrinking the windows partition (within windows) than restarted the installer and made a swap, boot and home partition for Loki and installed Loki. The installation went fine and Loki runs perfectly, but when I boot the computer, I can't choose between Loki and Windows, so I can't boot into Windows anymore, can anyone help me with this?

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  • The fact that Loki is warning you about damaging the MBR suggests that Windows 7 was installed in BIOS mode not UEFI, otherwise it would be using GPT. Can you verify that your laptop is actually booting into UEFI and not BIOS?
    – Mike Wild
    Sep 26, 2016 at 14:44
  • You were right, I checked a secure mode is disabled.
    – user72805
    Sep 28, 2016 at 9:01
  • This is not a elementaryOS issue, you need to understand what MBR, GPT, BIOS, EFI/UEFI, etc means first if you are going to dual-boot to keep both OS working
    – Sebastian
    Nov 16, 2018 at 19:06

3 Answers 3

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I'm no expert, but have you tried this? Boot-repair

It worked for me in previous problems i had

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  • I tried it, but it didn't work, unfortunetaly
    – user72805
    Sep 29, 2016 at 12:55
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I had boot problems too, but in my case I could only boot Windows. I recommed you to try rEFInd. Once installed, it should recognize all your OSes and let you choose which one to boot.

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  • This didn't work for me either, because I found out I don't have a EFI-bootpartition.
    – user72805
    Sep 29, 2016 at 12:57
  • You could try this in a terminal: "sudo update-grub" and see if that fixes the problem. When executing this command, you're telling grub to rescan your partitions in search of any OSes.
    – dvilela
    Sep 29, 2016 at 15:25
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First of all, you should try to unhide your grub menu.

  1. Open /etc/default/grub as sudo
  2. Comment the line GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 (put a # in the beginning)
  3. Set GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=menu (instead of hidden)
  4. Open terminal and do: sudo update-grub
  5. Reboot and you should see Grub menu. Select Windows and see if it boots.

If it doesn't boot, you should repair your Windows MBR. There is a comprehensive guide here: https://neosmart.net/wiki/fix-uefi-boot/

And after repairing your Windows MBR, you need Boot-repair to get Elementary to boot and then again, you need to unhide your grub menu with the steps i described above.

This happens to me everytime i install Elementary in a Windows 10 UEFI dual-boot. I have to repair Windows MBR, run boot-repair and unhide Grub from Elementary. It may seem boring and time-consuming, but you can do it under 20 minutes.

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