Linux Mint Forums

Mom bought a brand new computer with the evil Win8 on it. I disabled the secure boot and installed Nadia on it. When I installed it, I kept the Win8 partition in case mom wanted to go back to that. However, I don't recall seeing any way to set up dual boot. So now, it comes up in Mint (which is fine with me and the partition manager shows the other Win8 partition on it. I'm wondering if I can still get a grub in there or something to manage a dual boot. Ideas?

did you try running 'update-grub' ?
- to see if win8 would then appear in the new grub_menu list.

No, I didn't. I'll try that. Thing is... there's no grub list at all. It just boots right into Mint. But maybe update-grub will do that? The only place I found an option for grub is in the shutdown area, not in startup. And I selected that, but there was no change.

Anyway, I'll try the update-grub and see how that goes. Thanks!

Okay, I just tried it. It found Mint, Initrd, and Memtest. That's it. The boot block on the drive is FAT formatted, so I'm assuming it is (or was) the Win8 boot partition. Perhaps it's just being ignored because UEFI is disabled?

I think you'll have to either install a UEFI loader and point it to GRUB and Windows, or you'll have to reinstall Mint/GRUB in UEFI mode. Reinstalling Mint with GRUB-UEFI would be easiest IMO. I think you will have to manually partition the disks for that, or point GRUB to the FAT partition.
You can have UEFI without SecureBoot. I saw a 2-3 second boot time improvement with UEFI over BIOS. Not important for HDD systems, but quite important for SSD systems.

EDIT: Read this: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI

I had a feeling that might be the case, though I was hoping it wasn't. But in the end, perhaps a subconscious part of my mind wanted an excuse to blow away a fresh Microsoft install (as if I really needed an excuse!). So, at this point, I'll repartition the Win8 partition as ext4, make it a separate drive, and use it for Mint. Thanks for your response.