Dual Booting wint Win10 - No Grub Menu-Straight to Mint [Solved]

[jrgent]

On an Acer V5-132P (UEFI) laptop I installed Linux Mint 18.3 64 Cinnamon alongside the original Windows 8/10. I know I probably missed the last step which was the location for the boot loader. So, the boot loader was installed to whatever the default was. Now the computer boots straight into Mint. I can't seem to access the bios settings or boot from the USB drive that Mint was installed from. It always goes straight to Mint.

So, I'm probably asking is there anyway of fixing this from within Mint?

[Marziano]

Maybe this can help: from within Mint, open up a terminal and runsudo update-grub. You will be prompted to type in your password (note that there won't be any visual feedback). Press enter. When it's done, reboot and see if you get the Grub menu with options to boot into Mint, Windows, etc.

[jrgent]

No luck. It went through the process but when I rebooted it went straight to Mint.

I also installed Grub Customizer but it does not even list Windows as being there at all.

[Marziano]

Can you try getting into BIOS by pressing F2-key and holding it down, right after you power up your computer in order to see if you can boot into Windows by choosing Windows Boot Manager as boot option?

[Mute Ant]

"...does not even list Windows as being there..." It might not be of course. GRUB will only list OS kernels that it recognises and which it can boot for you. From Mint you can look at the whole picture and determine whether your installation actually left Windows on the drive...
lsblk ### Show the block devices that Linux has found.
fdisk -l ### Show the block devices and details of their content.
Posting the results of those two commands will show everyone what's there, and possibly what's not there any more.

[jrgent]

After looking around the net I came up with a the solution of how to get back into Windows. Simply holding F2 on boot does not do it. You have to hold the power button (and possibly the F2 button) until the computer comes on then immediately powers off. You do this three times. On the forth time you hold the F2 key and let the computer continue to power up. That apparently re-enables secure boot and Windows starts up. I then was able to get back into the EFI settings through Windows.

After just a little bit of playing with those settings it does not seem possible to install Linux Mint in EFI mode so both OS's can be seen in the Grub2 with Secure Boot enabled because the flash drive is ignored and the computer goes straight to Windows (even with the flash drive 1st in the Boot order).