SOLVED: Dual Boot LMDE / Win 8.1 Pro error

[kbkatz1]

Not running a UEFI system, Legacy BIOS only.
Installed Windows 8.1 Pro and LMDE on two separate HDDs.
GRUB sees LMDE and Windows 8.1 but fails to load Windows. The only way I can boot into Windows is to "F12" to enter BIOS boot options and boot from the HDD that contains Windows. I can however boot into LMDE from GRUB.
1. Is my GRUB not capable of supporting the Windows 8.1 loader?
2. How do a remedy this? I would prefer to choose which OS to boot into from GRUB.

[Pierre]

even though you are Not running a UEFI system,
did you look over this tutorial:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=163126

[kbkatz1]

That doesn't seem to address my issue...

[magicvince]

You can't have a double boot with windows without uefi.
You should install a 64 bits version

Maybe you could try to rebuild the boot and the grub with boot-repair-disk

http://sourceforge.net/p/boot-repair-cd/home/Home/

[magicvince]

You can't have a double boot with windows without uefi.
You should install a 64 bits version

Maybe you could try to rebuild the boot and the grub with boot-repair-disk

http://sourceforge.net/p/boot-repair-cd/home/Home/

[magicvince]

You can't have a double boot with windows without uefi.
You should install a 64 bits version

Maybe you could try to rebuild the boot and the grub with boot-repair-disk

http://sourceforge.net/p/boot-repair-cd/home/Home/

[kbkatz1]

Tried the Repair Boot Disk as mentioned above.... didn't work, now I can't boot into Windows 8.1, currently Windows is "Attempting to Repair", "this could take several hours".

Perhaps I should make the Windows 8.1 bootloader the default and not use Grub? Thoughts?

[kurotsugi]

it's a grub issue and I'm afraid you can't fix it on LMDE yet. you'll need to manually change the bootloader on boot to choose which OS should be loaded.

Perhaps I should make the Windows 8.1 bootloader the default and not use Grub? Thoughts?

the problem is that you can't make window's bootloader to load linux. the answer is no.

[kbkatz1]

Update:
I was able to get Windows 8.1 to launch through Grub by running bootrec /fix mbr and the other associated options. All is good.

[madosh]

it's a grub issue and I'm afraid you can't fix it on LMDE yet. you'll need to manually change the bootloader on boot to choose which OS should be loaded.

Perhaps I should make the Windows 8.1 bootloader the default and not use Grub? Thoughts?

the problem is that you can't make window's bootloader to load linux. the answer is no.

The windows 8/8.1/10 bootloader can't load Linux directly but it can load grub which in turn can load Linux. It's fine under BIOS mode at least. Haven't tried uefi yet.

Edit: It's necessary to install grub to the Linux partition for this to be possible. Then it involves adding a BCD entry pointing to grub.

Instructions here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/62440/is ... bootloader