List, good evening,
Our F24 installation in dual boot mode with Windows 7 has stopped W7
from booting from the Windows menu choice in Grub's screen. F24,
nevertheless, boots and operates fine.
Here are the installation details. We have a new laptop with Windows
7 pre-installed, which we'd configured for use, and backed up. The
BIOS is set for UEFI with legacy settings. Since W7 had occupied the
whole SSD we've upgraded the SSD (cloning the W7 SSD onto the new SSD
using dd) and then rechecked, and tested, W7 running on the lower
228GB of the new SSD; all was fine. We installed F24/Xfce/64 from its
'live' spin onto the the remaining (approx 250 GB) segment of the SSD,
allowing it to auto-partition. Installation proceeded without error;
gparted showed that F24 had created 2 more partitions above the W7
partitions. On reboot, Grub starts fine, the F24 selection boots
perfectly into F24, but selecting Windows just causes the machine to
'hang', showing a constant cursor in the top left corner of the screen.
Checks done so far:
1. Bios boot order now shows an additional item 'Fedora'. Switching
this 'Fedora' entry (in the Bios boot list) to below the HDD boot item
(in the Bios boot order) has no different effect.
2. Using the Grub CLI to set the root, the chainloader location, and
give a 'boot' command, has exactly the same effect as choosing the
Windows entry in the Grub menu - 'hang' with the constant cursor in
the top left corner. Grub CLI shows that the Windows boot partition,
and files, all seem to be in place (sda2,
/EFI/Microsoft/boot/bootmgfw.efi).
3. Because some of our work activities require use of Windows, it was
essential to make sure we could get back to Windows, so we ran the W7
Windows System repair CD. This identified a problem in the UEFI
firmware and wanted to reset the 'fwbootmgr' item in the UEFI system
(NVRAM, apparently). We let it do this - aware that it might have
repercussions on the F24 installation that was working well but, since
it is relatively easy to re-install Fedora, we proceeded to let
Windows recover. But this had two effects:
(i) Windows rebooted quite happily, without a murmur. But it rebooted
only itself; Fedora's Grub menu never appeared.
(ii) Though the Fedora Grub menu had gone, checking the boot order in
the Bios we found that there was, now, a new entry: 'Windows Boot
Loader'. This was above another entry, 'Fedora' which was never
executing now because 'Windows Boot Loader' had higher priority order.
Switching the boot order in the Bios - to place 'Fedora' at the top,
and 'Windows Boot Loader' second - Fedora's Grub menu then appears on
booting up; F24 will boot and run perfectly, but selecting the Windows
choice in Grub's menus again 'hangs' (with a cursor in the the top
left corner). Setting the HDD to be at the top of the boot order gave
the same result as setting 'Fedora' at the top - F24 would load, but
Windows would not.
Conclusions:
(i) UEFI seems to contain an 'order of booting'.
(ii) Fedora (presumably) makes a new entry in UEFI to point to its
Grub system on bootup - that aspect seems to succeed.
(iii) The chainloader sequence that Fedora employs executes a Windows
bootmgfw.efi (on this machine) which might be 'hanging'.
(iv) Might it be possible that the F24 installer has selected a file
other than that which Windows 7 itself *actually* uses when it boots?
Well, apologies for the length - I'd done quite a few checks and
thought it best to add those results to the post in case they help
narrow things down a bit. If anyone who managed this far has any
suggestions for some things to try or to check, I'd be very grateful.
In particular, I'd like to check which files W7 is using in its
initial boot - ie, that I could try to emulate with the Grub CLI. If
I could emulate a successful W7 boot, I could edit the F24 Grub
configuration and make the change permanent. Has anyone here tried
something similar themselves?
regards, Ron
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