After thinking about getting on board Linux for a couple of years, I finally pulled the trigger last week and installed Mint. The installation was straightforward and occurred without any issues whatsoever, but then I discovered that I couldn't return to Windows 10. It simply won't boot up and nothing I've done over the last few days has rectified it. So I'm calling on your collective wisdom and expertise to hopefully get this resolved.
Here are some of the key details:
- I'm running a Dell Inspiron 5680 with 64Gb RAM, 3 internal drives (256Gb SSD - which Windows was installed on, 1Tb HDD & 2Tb HDD).
- Mint 64-bit was installed alongside Win 10 64-bit. During the Mint installation, I was prompted to select a location for it and accepted the suggested 1Tb drive location. I later discovered Mint was instead installed on the 2Tb drive, but I don't know why as the 1Tb drive had plenty of available space and I wasn't prompted to pick another location anyway.
- The "Grub" menu appears and I have four options: Mint 21 Cinnamon, Advanced Options for Mint 21 Cinnamon, Windows Boot Manager & UEFI Firmware Settings.
As I said, the installation went well and I can get into Mint just fine. When I then attempted to boot back into Win 10 a little while later, it simply returned to the Grub menu. And this is about as good as it gets now. I just can't boot into Win 10! Foolishly, I didn't create a system image before attempting the Mint installation, because I'm impulsive and occasionally impatient. So I just launched right into the process with no fallback position. In hindsight, this was rather idiotic...and now here I am.
So what have I done to resolve this so far? Well, here's a summary of some of the actions I've attempted over two to three days (as recommended by various people on a range of different websites and forums):
- I went into the BIOS and changing the boot order priority. Up until today, Windows 10 was an option but now it's gone, probably because I inadvertently made it disappear with one of the actions below (or another one I can't recall). Anyway, moving Win 10 to the top and disabling the other boot options (including Ubuntu, which is how Mint appears to be labelled there) made no difference.
- From the MS website, I downloaded the Win 10 ISO image and stuck it on a USB drive to then try and do a repair job. I then tried to do this by using Ventoy (as recommended on this forum - forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=352449) but that didn't seem to do anything either or I didn't configure something correctly with it. When I last ran this earlier today, it said it couldn't find a valid system image file or something similar. I don't understand why the official one I got from the MS website was no longer valid. Could it have expired?
- Using Terminal, I tried "sudo update-grub".
- In the BIOS, I deselected Secure Boot and allowed Legacy Boots.
- I've run a program called Macrium Reflect (which sits on the USB drive) to conduct a boot repair. It doesn't work but DOES allow me to run a Command Prompt session easily, which is helpful.
- Windows Repair doesn't do anything. It just says it cannot be repaired.
- I've followed the Diskpart, BCDBoot and Bootrec steps in Command Prompt (as found on this page: https://www.digitalcitizen.life/command ... t-records/). I get errors.
- There are probably numerous other actions I've taken too, but I end up with only Mint as a workable OS. This is obviously good because I can at least still do drive backups before trying anything extreme like a system reset, if that ends up being the best solution.
To try and understand what's happened and to see if any of my previous files and folders had been affected (or deleted somehow), I went into the Drives app in Mint. This has been useful and I've been able to ascertain the configuration and location of the installations - and confirm that nothing appears to have been lost. But I am perplexed by the layout and number of partitions that exist.
I was going to insert an image here to make this easy to view but I'm not sure how to do it.
Windows was installed on the SSD (Volume 5) but now appears to be sitting on the 2Tb drive as well (Volume 4)! When I'm in Command Prompt, Windows can be found on drive X:, not C: or E: as expected.
This is a really long post. And I'm really tired from trying to resolve this without any success so far. So I genuinely hope that the members here might be able to provide guidance around what to do next. Your help would be greatly appreciated. Before I finish this, here's the INXI report, just to make this even longer...
Code: Select all
System:
Kernel: 5.15.0-43-generic x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 11.2.0 Desktop: Cinnamon 5.4.9
tk: GTK 3.24.33 wm: Mutter dm: LightDM Distro: Linux Mint 21 Vanessa base: Ubuntu 22.04 jammy
Machine:
Type: Desktop System: Dell product: Inspiron 5680 v: 2.1.0 serial: <superuser required> Chassis:
type: 3 serial: <superuser required>
Mobo: Dell model: 0PXWHK v: A00 serial: <superuser required> UEFI: Dell v: 2.1.0
date: 05/10/2019
CPU:
Info: 6-core model: Intel Core i7-8700 bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Coffee Lake rev: A cache:
L1: 384 KiB L2: 1.5 MiB L3: 12 MiB
Speed (MHz): avg: 4375 high: 4400 min/max: 800/4600 cores: 1: 4350 2: 4327 3: 4392 4: 4376
5: 4400 6: 4399 7: 4374 8: 4386 9: 4359 10: 4358 11: 4383 12: 4399 bogomips: 76799
Flags: avx avx2 ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx
Graphics:
Device-1: NVIDIA GP104 [GeForce GTX 1070] vendor: Dell driver: nvidia v: 515.65.01 pcie:
speed: 2.5 GT/s lanes: 16 ports: active: none off: DVI-D-1 empty: DP-1, DP-2, DP-3, HDMI-A-1
bus-ID: 01:00.0 chip-ID: 10de:1b81
Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.3 driver: X: loaded: nvidia
unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,nouveau,vesa gpu: nvidia display-ID: :0 screens: 1
Screen-1: 0 s-res: 1920x1080 s-dpi: 95
Monitor-1: DVI-D-0 res: 1920x1080 dpi: 96 diag: 587mm (23.1")
OpenGL: renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070/PCIe/SSE2 v: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 515.65.01
direct render: Yes
Audio:
Device-1: Intel 200 Series PCH HD Audio vendor: Dell driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel
bus-ID: 00:1f.3 chip-ID: 8086:a2f0
Device-2: NVIDIA GP104 High Definition Audio vendor: Dell driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel
pcie: speed: 8 GT/s lanes: 16 bus-ID: 01:00.1 chip-ID: 10de:10f0
Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.15.0-43-generic running: yes
Sound Server-2: PulseAudio v: 15.99.1 running: yes
Sound Server-3: PipeWire v: 0.3.48 running: yes
Network:
Device-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet vendor: Dell driver: r8169
v: kernel pcie: speed: 2.5 GT/s lanes: 1 port: d000 bus-ID: 02:00.0 chip-ID: 10ec:8168
IF: enp2s0 state: down mac: <filter>
Device-2: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter vendor: Dell
driver: ath10k_pci v: kernel pcie: speed: 2.5 GT/s lanes: 1 bus-ID: 03:00.0 chip-ID: 168c:0042
IF: wlp3s0 state: up mac: <filter>
Bluetooth:
Device-1: Qualcomm Atheros type: USB driver: btusb v: 0.8 bus-ID: 1-12:5 chip-ID: 0cf3:e009
Report: hciconfig ID: hci0 rfk-id: 0 state: down bt-service: enabled,running rfk-block:
hardware: no software: yes address: <filter>
RAID:
Hardware-1: Intel SATA Controller [RAID mode] driver: ahci v: 3.0 bus-ID: 00:17.0
chip-ID: 8086:2822
Drives:
Local Storage: total: 3.07 TiB used: 51.22 GiB (1.6%)
ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Seagate model: ST1000DM010-2EP102 size: 931.51 GiB speed: 6.0 Gb/s
serial: <filter>
ID-2: /dev/sdb vendor: Western Digital model: WD20EZRZ-00Z5HB0 size: 1.82 TiB speed: 6.0 Gb/s
serial: <filter>
ID-3: /dev/sdc vendor: SK Hynix model: SC311 SATA 256GB size: 238.47 GiB speed: 6.0 Gb/s
serial: <filter>
ID-4: /dev/sdd type: USB vendor: Western Digital model: WD1200BEVS-00UST0 size: 111.79 GiB
serial: <filter>
Partition:
ID-1: / size: 141.06 GiB used: 50.84 GiB (36.0%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sdb4
ID-2: /boot/efi size: 511 MiB used: 5.3 MiB (1.0%) fs: vfat dev: /dev/sdb3
Swap:
ID-1: swap-1 type: file size: 2 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) priority: -2 file: /swapfile
USB:
Hub-1: 1-0:1 info: Hi-speed hub with single TT ports: 16 rev: 2.0 speed: 480 Mb/s
chip-ID: 1d6b:0002
Device-1: 1-1:2 info: Western Digital WD Passport (WDXMS) type: Mass Storage
driver: usb-storage rev: 2.0 speed: 480 Mb/s chip-ID: 1058:0702
Device-2: 1-4:3 info: Dell MS116 Optical Mouse type: Mouse driver: hid-generic,usbhid rev: 2.0
speed: 1.5 Mb/s chip-ID: 413c:301a
Device-3: 1-5:4 info: Dell KB216 Wired Keyboard type: Keyboard,HID driver: hid-generic,usbhid
rev: 1.1 speed: 1.5 Mb/s chip-ID: 413c:2113
Device-4: 1-12:5 info: Qualcomm Atheros type: Bluetooth driver: btusb rev: 2.0 speed: 12 Mb/s
chip-ID: 0cf3:e009
Hub-2: 2-0:1 info: Super-speed hub ports: 10 rev: 3.0 speed: 5 Gb/s chip-ID: 1d6b:0003
Sensors:
System Temperatures: cpu: 29.8 C mobo: 27.8 C gpu: nvidia temp: 36 C
Fan Speeds (RPM): cpu: 1020 fan-1: 1133 gpu: nvidia fan: 27%
Repos:
Packages: 2399 apt: 2393 flatpak: 6
No active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list
Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/additional-repositories.list
1: deb https: //download.opensuse.org/repositories/Emulators:/Wine:/Debian/xUbuntu_18.04/ ./
2: deb http: //dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ artful main
Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list
1: deb https: //mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/linuxmint-packages vanessa main upstream import backport
2: deb http: //mirror.overthewire.com.au/ubuntu jammy main restricted universe multiverse
3: deb http: //mirror.overthewire.com.au/ubuntu jammy-updates main restricted universe multiverse
4: deb http: //mirror.overthewire.com.au/ubuntu jammy-backports main restricted universe multiverse
5: deb http: //security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jammy-security main restricted universe multiverse
Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq-focal.sources
1: deb [arch=amd64 i386] https: //dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu focal main
Info:
Processes: 340 Uptime: 36m Memory: 15.43 GiB used: 1.72 GiB (11.1%) Init: systemd v: 249
runlevel: 5 Compilers: gcc: 11.2.0 alt: 11 Client: Unknown python3.10 client inxi: 3.3.13
If you've made it this far, I thank you for reading. And if you can help me to resolve the mystery of the missing Win 10 OS - and, more importantly, how to get it back - I will be extremely grateful.
Thanks,
Ben
ps. apologies if I've messed up any of the formatting or posting conventions. It's all starting to blur...