My system has 2 (separate) drives:
an M.2 with Windows 10
an SSD with OpenMandriva
My OpenMandriva drive keeps losing its ability to boot.
This happens after I, instead, boot into my (separate) Windows 10 drive.
Then the next time I try to boot OpenMandriva it will not.
I have to use “Boot Repair” to restore the ability to boot my OpenMandriva drive.
Then, the next time I boot to Windows this cycle repeats (over and over).
One more thing:
I also have a third SSD with the current version of Zorin.
Its booting ability is NOT lost after booting into Windows. Weird???
My Question:
I am simply NOT experienced in Linux.
Is my booting problem related to the OpenMandriva drive or the Motherboard UEFI Bios
Is there something I can do to preserve the OpenMandriva boot ability?
Welcome! We are happy to see you and hope that you will decide to make this your home.
I am kind of weird, so I don’t dual boot the way most people do. I install each OS on its own drive with the others unplugged and they don’t know about the others. Then I use the boot selector in the UEFI to boot to the one I want. For me, the key is F8, but yours might be different.
But like @rugyada said, check to make sure Windows is not hibernating. This does cause issues.
First check what @rugyada posted. If that does not correct this we will need to know from where are you booting? Are you using multiple boot-loaders or one specific one, and if so which one.
Each OS is on its own SSD. No dual booting here.
(Select boot drive on my MB is F12).
My Windows drive is on an M.2 so it is unavoidably available via the UEFI when I connect and try to boot to my OpenMandriva SSD.
Hibernation is available on my Windows drive but this is not the issue and can be ruled out.
Again, for whatever reason I do not lose booting ability on my Zorin SSD drive. I wonder what the difference might be???
So you enter the firmware/BIOS with F12 and select either openmandriva or ‘OpenMandriva_Lx_[GRUB]’ and it does not boot?
Is there any error message?
This seems like where ever the OMLx boot-loader is written to is being overwritten by something. I can not yet envision what or how this would happen. If your OMLx system is on a separate drive and you are booting this way that drive shoud at least have /boot/efi and / partitions. Something similar to this:
You could have additional partitions like /home but you should have at least these 2 to boot this way. Then assuming the drive is /dev/sda you would boot into your OMLx systems and run:
sudo update-grub2 sudo grub2-install /dev/sda
Where you change /dev/sda to the actual designation for you drive. If is is nvme it could be something like /dev/nvme0n1 but that path has to be exactly what fits your machine.
Then when you go into the firmware/BIOS you select to boot from that drive and that should work.
I hope that the following might be helpful: When my OpenMandriva SSD is bootable then one of the F12 partition options explicitly begins “OpenMandriva…”. This works. (There is also another menu option referencing this (OpenMandriva) SSD but more “generically” labeled). After I have booted into Windows the good “OpenMandriva…” partition no longer appears in the F12 boot selection menu. BTW, the “generically” labeled partition boots the SSD but brings up a GRUB screen. This is wildly beyond my limited knowledge so I have to resort to “Boot Repair” again. Thank you all for your kind help!
Thank you all. Some specifics. When the following F12 boot menu option, “openmandriva: PO: SPCC Solid State Diskette” is available I can boot into OpenMandriva. The other two F12 menu items related to this SSD simply boot into a terminal. They are “ubuntu (PO: SPCC Solid State Diskette)” and “PO: SPCC Solid State Diskette”. Again, booting into Windows removes the desired “openmandriva: …” boot option and I am left with the two “terminal” options.
Then my immediate question is, “Why would the Windows Bootloader” selectively scrub away the “openmandriva…” option? If I attach my (other) Zorin SSD its (F12) boot option is available. What am I missing here? Thank you all for your generous ideas.
The Windows Bootloader cannot deal with Linux drives. When you run the Boot Repair, make sure the Linux drives are NOT plugged in. Windows should know about them.
When I install multiple OSes, I have 3 nvme drives and I have to unplug them from the sockets and install one and put an OS on it. Pull it out and go to the next. That way, none of them know about the others.
Thank you WilsonPhillips. “Boot Repair” is a Linux utility I found using a web search. It appears to be a fairly often recommended utility. To your other question, my Windows M.2 is, by default, “plugged in” at all times.
Do I correctly understand you that “Boot Repair” works on the motherboard UEFI? I do not understand how “Boot Repair” could update (OpenMandriva) when it is simly not present.
The weird thing is the way the (separate) OpenMandriva SSD and Zorin SSD drives behave on the F12 menu. The boot menu “scrubbing” only happens to the OpenMandriva SSD. I find this confusing. Anyway, I do NOT have GRUB knowledge to really know what I should otherwise be asking. (These two drives are not plugged in at the same time). Both were added (installed) relatively recently. My original Windows 10 M.2 already existed.
I am not familiar with a Linux Boot Repair package. No, it would not effect the UEFI boot manager. I was thinking that you were running this to repair the Windows bootloader.
I don’t know what version of GRUB Zorin is using or if it was plugged in when you installed OM, but OM uses GRUB2. I am guessing the om is the last thing that was installed.
Here is how I would approach it. Pull the Windows NVME drive and get the OM drive up and running without Windows being visible to it. If there is a place in there to tell it to not look for other OSes, or not to run OSProber, do so.
If OM is a really recent install, I would pull the Windows drive out and do a fresh install of OM and let it set up GRUB again.
Once it is up and running, plug the NVME drive in again.
Silly question time: (apologies if you said it and I overlooked it)
Are you powering down your PC when you are switching SSD’s or are you hot swapping?
I would recommend powering down even though hot swapping should be safe, because the UEFI entry may not update. Make sure your firmware on the system board is up to date, also.
Thank you zeroability. Not a silly question at all.
I am absolutely powering down my PC before connecting a drive and booting up.
More details.
I had to run “Boot Repair” today to reinstate the “openmandriva: PO: SPCC Solid State Disk” F12 boot menu option. For what it is worth the report it returned is as follows:
An error occurred during the repair. Error: no grub.efi generated for OpenMandriva Lx 25.04 (25.04). Please report this message to boot.repair@xxxxx.xxx*
Please write on a paper the following URL: xxxxx://paste.ubuntu.xxx/p/jk3XbVP7th/
In case you still experience boot problem, indicate this URL to:
*boot.repair@xxxxx.xxx *
You can now reboot your computer. Please do not forget to make your UEFI firmware boot on the OpenMandriva Lx 25.04 (25.04) entry (sda1 file) ! If your computer reboots directly into Windows, try to change the boot order in your UEFI firmware. If your UEFI firmware does not allow to change the boot order, change the default boot entry of the Windows bootloader.
It doesn’t see grub. That tells me, it was trying to use the Windows bootloader and Windows can’t deal with Linux. It would be difficult to walk you through installing Grub and getting it setup if you don’t have the experience. How hard would it be for you to do a clean install of OM on the drive (without the others plugged in)? This would probably be the quickest and easiest way to get you running.
This is often difficult and quite the learning experience.