Any and all help would be so greatly appreciated. I’ve been battling with my laptop to be able to dual-boot Ubuntu Cinnamon and Windows 10 for about four days now. I’ve probably gone down five or six different rabbit-holes of troubleshooting, GRUB command-line fun, reinstalling and updating the BIOS, trying and failing to deal with VMX and locked NVram. As of now, my system boot-loops and fails to run Windows, but paradoxically I am able to get Ubuntu running, which is what I am using now.

I’ll try to provide as much relevant information here as I can:

  • Device: HP ZBook 17, gen 6
  • Primary OS: Windows 10 Home
  • Linux distro: Ubuntu Cinnamon 23.10
  • Ubuntu location: /dev/sda3
  • grub-install --version = 2.12~rc1-10ubuntu4
  • boot-repair Boot-info summary: https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/rxZ3D5GtpP/
  • I’m more than happy to provide more information as it’s requested.

As of now, I am unable to run Windows through the BIOS. If I run via the dedicated SSD as I normally do, it boot-loops, and if I try to go through any other drives it just tells me I need to install an OS. I am currently able to run Ubuntu, but only by going through the following process:

  1. Startup menu
  2. Boot configuration
  3. Boot from EFI > Ubuntu > shimx64.efi

At this point, I am happy with two outcomes to this scenario:

  1. I am able to run my laptop with Windows 10 as the primary OS, with the ability to dual-boot to Ubuntu Cinnamon 23.10.
  2. Assuming option 1 is impossible/requires a Herculean amount of work to pull off from this state, I am willing to scrub Windows 10 from my laptop and move forward with Cinnamon as my daily driver, though I am rather inexperienced in it. I can learn to move forward as I need to and run a VM or WINE for any Windows-specific processes I still need to do. But I would rather keep this option as my dead man’s switch.
  • @ClassyOP
    5•6 months ago

    I appreciate the elegance of your answer but it’s a bit lacking in detail. Are you saying that I should go with the nuclear option when installing Linux and remove the old files? I might just remove my HDD in that case and install Linux into the dedicated SSD.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•6 months ago

        Should definitely be mentioned that dual booting isn’t nearly the headache if you have separate drives and don’t try to have the boot loaders in the same partition. I have Win10 and its boot area on one ssd, and two distros of linux sharing the boot partition on the second ssd, and there’s been no issues. But there’s a good chance Windows boot gets screwed if you try to put it all on one disk.

      • @ClassyOP
        3•6 months ago

        Thanks for the no-nonsense reply. I have been smelling a little bit of bullshit with the whole dual boot fiasco here for a bit. VMX not behaving, Windows’ VM utility not behaving, BIOS not behaving, it’s like goddamn if I type a command I wouldn’t mind if it stuck instead of seemingly getting thrown into a black hole.

        Going with your approach, I imagine if I pick a home distro and decide I want to move to another down the line the transition is far easier than this? Even if I am switching from say Ubuntu to Fedora?

          • @ClassyOP
            1•6 months ago

            I’ll have to spend some time backing up and moving some files around but I think this is how I’ll move forward. I think I’ll also find a cracked Win10 image and I’ll keep it on a thumb drive if ever i need to full on run the OS. I use a few proprietary software that universally get the JUST USE FOSS ALTERNATIVES argument from people not in the know.

        • @[email protected]
          2•6 months ago

          I’ve been happily dualbooting Win10/Mint for years on the very machine I’m writing from. Zero issues with boots, GRUB, no need for flatpaks, both systems work fine, both configs heavily customized.