- Messages
- 187
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.
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.
My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- Windows 8 64 bit
- System Manufacturer/Model
- HP Pavillion G7-2251dx
- CPU
- AMD A-8 4500M
- Memory
- 8 Gigabytes DDR3 sdram
- Graphics Card(s)
- Discrete ATI Radeon HD 7640G with 2 Gigs
- Sound Card
- IDT Audio
- Monitor(s) Displays
- 17.3
- Screen Resolution
- 1600x900
- Hard Drives
- 500 gig
- Internet Speed
- 3.5 mb/sec