When Secure Boot Fails - System Repair broke my Windows

I had a problem where I was running UEFI with secure boot disabled and dual booting with Linux Mint which is UEFI compliant. Mint had installed Grub, Mint's boot manager but I don't like Grub so i installed rEFInd. Unlike Grub rEFInd has support for UEFI and should have worked better as a boot manager. But it gave me problems too. So I had Grub and rEFInd both installed. I could boot to both Mint and Windows but the boot managers, both Grub or rEFInd, would not show at startup like they are supposed to. I had to boot the PC, then hit Escape getting into my options menu built into the system, hit F9 to get a list of boot options where i could then choose to boot from hard drive, cd rom, usb etc. rEFInd was in this list. Only after choosing rEFInd from here, was I able to open rEFInd and choose Windows or Mint. This is way too many steps to boot into an OS, so i thought i'd try to use the system repair disk to repair my master boot record or the EFI data that the system uses at boot under UEFI. I forgot that i had to run some additional commands under command prompt and just ran automatic repair from Advanced instead.

At this time Windows had no trouble working at all with secure boot enabled if I really needed windows to use secure boot.

It said it found but could not fix the errors. Suddenly, Windows would not boot even with secure boot enabled. I reran the tool 3 times and it didn't help so i wiped the drive and reinstalled Windows from a clean state. I really did not have errors on the system to begin with accept that the system was trying to access my boot managers in an odd manner.. although i could get everything to work.

The automatic repair option should not have made things worse, even breaking my secure boot but it did.

My point of this is to show that the repair disk tools and how they play with the EFI boot tools is buggy and it can break your system even if there is nothing wrong with Windows and it's ability to boot under secure boot. Don't trust the Repair Disk tool folks. Don't trust UEFI. Don't trust Secure Boot. Be smart. Install a clean system under Legacy Bios mode with UEFI and secure boot disabled.

Did you check the settings in your GRUB config files?

My GRUB (from Linux Mint 14 MATE install) wasn't auto booting the selected OS (W7).
The countdown time was set, but one of the other options disabled it.
Once I changed that option, everything worked as expected.

lehnerus2000 said:

Did you check the settings in your GRUB config files?

My GRUB (from Linux Mint 14 MATE install) wasn't auto booting the selected OS (W7).
The countdown time was set, but one of the other options disabled it.
Once I changed that option, everything worked as expected.

Click to expand...

Once I installed rEFInd I could not even access grub unless I did it from rEFInd's menu. I didn't try that option but should have. No matter though, how messed up my grub or rEFInd configuration was running that tool should not have broken things for windows running under secure boot.

Mint has some type of UEFI compatibility and so does rEFInd. Grub is MBR only. The beauty of rEFInd when it works properly is it has the ability to see a UEFI system and a MBR system ind give you the option to choose between them. No other tool can do this. I suspect the repair disk saw something in either Mint's or UEFI's compatibility and balked at it.. but it should not have messed up secure boot because secure boot was disabled at the time. Secure Boot had been disabled during this entire process so nothing in secure boot could have been corrupted for the repair disk to try to fix or mess with it.

Do you have the Windows System Reserved partition?

Most of the GRUB problems I have seen discussed on SevenForums, seem to be related to the Windows System Reserved partition.
I always pre-partition my HDDs, so I never get that WSR partition and GRUB has always worked (apart from the auto boot incident).

I don't have UEFI though and I don't know anything about rEFInd.