How To Fix Multiboot Systems | Windows & Linux

let's talk about multi boots specifically when multi boot goes wrong and you're sitting there going oh my god how do i repair my Windows boot loader or how do i repair grub now I've independently touched on this but never really multi boot scenarios so what I'm gonna do in this one is first install Windows that overrides grub and it only boots back into Windows how to take care of this and I'm gonna do that in two methods the first method is modifying the windows bootloader to be inclusive of Linux and the second method is to have the Linux bootloader take back over and actually be able to boot into both Windows and Linux so I want to go ahead and go over these two different scenarios and at the very end on grub yes grub by itself at the native forum is kind of ugly I would do some themeing here and I did a video over how to theme grub so check that out after you get this going if you go that direction but I wanted to give you a choice on this video so that's why I'm touching on both the windows method and then also the Linux method this video is brought to you by CD in 77 the content delivery network used by space agencies and CentOS I also amusing this on Chris Titus comm to speed up my website so if you're interested in this click the link in the description all right so here's our basic system we're gonna be using as a multi boot now I am doing this in the VM so we're not using new efi or efi partitions now if you are using an efi partition note this process is a bit different as there is no active partition it relies on a singular efi partition her drive so just know this could look a little bit different this is mainly for legacy boot and MBR setup so with that said let's go ahead and launch into gparted and kind of show you what it looks like now this is an advanced tutorial so just know that I don't want a new in here hacking around that you can delete and lose all your data I want to just specify that up front so right now all we have on here is the Linux partition and we have 50 gigs unallocated so what we're gonna do is add Windows to this 50 gig portion now this is onedrive so we could have multiple drives in here but I want to go ahead and emulate onedrive and kind of show you what happens when we add Windows to this so let's go ahead and install windows on this 50 gig portion of the drive now obviously if I didn't need Windows I could get into the resize move portion of this drag this over and then I'd have 80 gigs on my Linux Drive likewise if you wanted to remove multi boot and those types of things you could easily go ahead and delete like the other partition and then resize this and you know there's just so much power to gparted that you can actually do it at your fingertips um so with that let's go ahead close out gparted I'm gonna insert my Windows CD and I'm gonna use a minimal install here with that well go ahead and hit cancel and then we're just gonna reboot this and log in through the actual cd-rom so it's as if we put in a thumb drive and this should boot into the actual Windows installer alright it's grabbing our image and it should go ahead and install this will point it to just that empty partition during the install process and we should be good I'm gonna fly through this install real fast I've installed Windows I don't know how many times more times than I care to count that's for sure so I'm gonna go ahead and just fast-forward through this whole section so during this portion definitely custom and then we just picked that unallocated space of 50 gigs and hit next now this will go ahead and copy everything but I want to just tell you what Windows is gonna do here Windows is notorious whenever it does a feature update which are these big biannual updates that get done it actually overrides a lot of the boot loaders so that's why I never I'm a proponent if you're using a multi boot system of one updating that bootloader or actually doing a giant feature update on Windows because it will mess up that Linux partition and you'll have to repair it like we're gonna do in this video but we're gonna purposely break it by installing windows on this secondary partition and I'm gonna show you kind of what Windows does now it'll it'll take make two partitions one is like where all your files are stored but it also makes something called system reserved partition this partition is going to be labeled as system and it'll be labeled as active by default active flag again is for legacy and MBR systems if you're on efi or newer hardware or a system that's set up with UEFI know that this video or this actual legacy bootloader is gonna be completely different there is no active flag so what we're gonna do here is actually mark the active flag from system reserved over to linux but this is also gonna do some other shenanigans Windows has a tendency to actually mess up that bootloader on Linux so it'll actually say like missing operating system so we'll repair that as well but let's also kind of walk you through some other scenarios here that are a bit problematic to touch on the efi UEFI even though i'm not gonna be able to show it since this is a legacy install i do want to tell you upfront what windows likes to do is override the entire efi partition what Windows has so it will actually take control and basically wipe the Linux bootloader out and put Windows in its spot now this way doesn't quite do that method because it doesn't have access to that ext4 or that linux partition but it does do some shenanigans to it to where it won't boot anymore so we'll fix all that in Windows I'm gonna show you two methods of fixing it the first method is just modifying the Windows boot loader to just kind of take over and actually show the Linux option which is pretty easy and then that's probably the easiest way of doing it that way when Windows updates it's not constantly breaking your Linux install and then the second way is just to take grub and repair it now you need active Linux media to repair it I'm gonna probably use just an Arch Linux ISO because it's the easiest way to get into that Linux partition and repair with grub but whenever I say Linux is Linux this is a good example of that because Lubuntu is a Debian based distribution and use an arch to repair it while not necessarily recommended it does work so I want to go ahead and show that showcase that as well all right I'm gonna go ahead and fly through the little setup process here for Windows go ahead and say personal use and offline account on newer versions of Windows if you don't see that offline account just make sure you don't have an active internet connection user and also another pro tip when doing setup don't put a password in because you can actually skip all the questions they ask you on 18:09 and past so all the newer versions of Windows setup you can skip a lot of the password reset questions by just not putting a password obviously going and fix that after you set up though okay here we go now it will probably download and be installing drivers while I'm doing this but we're just gonna go ahead and a reboot just so you can see what happens now I'm before I do the reboot I'm gonna just show you the new partition layout under a disk management and you're gonna see that this is the one disk we have it's 80 we have 30 gigs this is actually a linux partition that windows can't read the system reserved which is system active primary and then we have the C Drive which has a majority of the space so this is basically the current layout now let's go ahead and reboot and it should just pick this up because this is active so let's go ahead and reboot and see what happens and you see it just picked right back up into windows it just skipped over that linux partition gives no longer active so the easy way to do is just to modify the Windows boot loader to recognize Linux then you don't have to worry about Windows updates messing things up so let's go ahead and do that all right now I went ahead and got Chrome installed here we're just gonna go in here and go download easy BCD this is a good way to modify the actual bootloader in Windows now there's a free version they do have a paid version for I think more serious users but I affirmed personally use it should be fine all right we have easy BCD downloaded should be able to launch into it and we'll go ahead and hit I agree and install the program on launch you'll see that it you should see the windows but we'll have to add an entry for our Linux partition so from here we'll just say add new entry we only have one or one entry right here so we'll go ahead add Linux and it's actually gonna be grub to grub one it's not really on there much anymore so grub two and this is gonna be a loop bun too so with that we'll hit add and then let's go ahead and look at view settings you'll see the bunty's on there now it auto but detected all that so should be fine we can't actually close out of this and reboot and see what we get all right so we got our two options here we should be able to click LaVon to Linux see what happens and there we go we're now loaded into LaVon to Linux now you did notice I will say this did take a lot longer to start up from using grub because Windows bootloader kind of sucks to be honest so with that let's say let's boot back into Windows we'll just go ahead and leave our loop on - but this would work for 99% of people and you only have one hard drive I'd probably recommend just doing this portion of it because eventually a feature update will come along and break that bootloader and now you kind of know how to modify the Windows boot loader to do it but let's say you have multiple drives and you want to go ahead and make another drive active and push it over there and you don't have to really mess around with it too much now I'm gonna show you how to do it on onedrive using just grub now but just know that this way is a bit more hacky when it comes to doing this in results can vary so if you do only have one Drive I do recommend this first method but I want to still teach you and give you options and show you how to repair it using the second method as well so this time we're gonna boot back into Windows and from here we're gonna launch into PowerShell admin and we're gonna use a utility called disk part because I would like to use just disk manager just disk management right here and we what we want to do is just change this active to be this one active or mark partition is active well we can't do it from disk part or disk management for whatever reason so we'll do it from command or actual PowerShell on Windows so we'll just launch it to disk part from here with list disks or list disk and then we'll select disk 0 and then we'll list partition and then select our Linux partition which is a partition 1 with that we just say active with it selected and then we just simply exit exit and now let's go back into disk management from Windows and you should see our partition is now active now in a perfect world you'd reboot and this would work but Windows has other ideas you'll see some shenanigans that did to our Linux partition so let's go ahead and restart so unreal see this you'll see missing operating system even with that partition active it's just not able to boot with it because something happened to grub during one of these feature updates but have no fear we can use any live CD to do this but I find arch to be just a little bit easier because it's such a small ISO you can boot right into it and then just run a grub install so let's go ahead and do that using Arch Linux now mind you this is still a Lube unto install but as I said you can still utilize other Linux installs to to repair garage because they pretty much all work the same just sometimes the syntax changes a bit so we'll go Arch Linux and then we're just gonna go ahead and give this a reboot okay so we booted into the live is o of Arch Linux and we're just presented with this screen right here now this can be a little scary but there's some really easy commands we can do to repair grub now obviously we're not gonna install Arch we're not gonna change our existing Linux install because this is lube unto we just wanted to repair grub so it's very easy to do one we're just gonna do a listing of disk so let's do LS BL k and you'll see we have X V da one is the 30 gig Linux partition so we can need to mount this so we'll go mount and then we'll go dev X V da one and then we're gonna just put this in a min T now we need a CH root into this now if it's a Debian based system typically chroot space /mnt is the command but since this is an arch Elias ISO again the syntax changes a little bit so we're gonna do arch - CH root m NT and then from here we're gonna do grub install and then whenever you do grub install typically you'd specify the drive you want so we'll do dev X V D a now some people mess up on this and put the partition you don't want that you actually want the drive itself so dev xB da would be the cropper one but for most people this would be dev /s da for that that drive but don't put a number after it as that'sa partitions so right here it says it's not available and that's okay we can just actually go over and specify exactly where this is so we'll go s bin or slash grub install def XB da so it says installations finished and it just took the existing configuration and then did that so we'll just go ahead and hit exit you mount for unmount all you don't necessarily need to do this but i like to and then we're gonna go do a reboot i'm gonna go ahead and inject the media though so we removed the USB drive in most areas and now we can just reboot and it booted right back in but did you notice even though we're back on grub it's booting directly back into our linux partition this is not working quite right as this by itself is now actually uh just giving us Linux so it's the exact opposite problem we're only getting Linux no no windows so come down into here and we're gonna need to install grub customizer so this is the easy way to do it obviously you can mainly edit these comp files but I wanted to make it for the everyday user so we're just gonna go into terminal and then we're just gonna do sudo apt install grub customizer alright with grub customizer installed we should be fine if you do run into problems where it doesn't detect windows make sure you also install it's actually called OS - prober this actually is able to detect windows now obviously i start already have OS prober but i just wanted to mention that just in case it doesn't detect windows so we'll exit out and launch grub customizer and obviously we'll need root password privileges to launch into this and there it goes it detected Windows 10 so let's go ahead push it up hit to here and then go general settings we're gonna remove quiet and splash just so we get bad and we're gonna go ahead increase the boot default to ten seconds so we actually get our boot screen now why I like grub instead of like Windows is you can really really customize it and put theming and all kinds of really awesome stuff on here so that's why I really like grab customizer and just by changing all these things and hitting save it's it's ready to roll so we'll go ahead and give it a reboot and look at our Start screen now now it's still using stock grub I want to just go ahead and put that out there because stock grub looks a little ugly in my opinion well looks a lot ugly in my opinion but I would deem this out and make like a really cool theme for it so now we could actually boot right into Windows 10 or lube onto now we know the linux version was but I'm gonna just go ahead boot into Windows just to kind of showcase that alright and we're back into Windows so from here let's look at Disk Management one more time just to see what it looks like and you see active primary partition system primary and then all of this has changed so there we go that's dual booting using both from coming from the windows section and then also coming from the Linux section so this kind of helps you get around as I said EFI is a little more difficult as you're dealing with just the efi partition and windows and linux will fight over that partition so just know that when you get in a fight like that it's best just to let windows control your bootloader as it will eventually override it almost every six months so this is a just a good entry into multi booting it can get really complex and hopefully this demystifies some of it so that was multi booting in Windows and Linux how to basically use onedrive I don't ever recommend really doing this but I know some people are strapped and they can't afford two drives or maybe it's a laptop that they really just want to dual boot on and they don't want to have multiple drives so here you go I still recommend the two hard drive approach as when you have two separate hard drives typically it's very easy to isolate your boot loaders and they don't overwrite each other but now you can use that one drive and repair it as needed so with that let me know all your thoughts down in the comment section and as always thank you to all my patrons without you I couldn't make videos like this one and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Chris Titus Tech

Views: 46,928

Keywords: chris titus tech, how to, system, how to dual boot, how to fix an operating system wasnt found, how to fix an operating system wasn't found, how to fix computer boot up problems, how to fix boot up problem, how to restore ubuntu grub loader, fix, how to install two operating systems on one computer, gnu/linux (operating system), how to fix windows 10 startup problem, how to fix a computer that wont boot up, multiboot, usb multiboot, multiboot usb windows, multi-boot, dual boot

Id: 3oQfnNhk7qU

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 20 2019