I'm trying to dual-boot Windows 10 with Fedora and Ubuntu on an Acer laptop using UEFI. The system has a 1 TB HDD and a 128 GB NVMe SSD. Fedora 44 installed but hung at its splash screen, so I later installed Ubuntu using manual partitioning. The layout now appears to include a Windows NTFS partition, a roughly 629 MB VFAT partition, an approximately 522 GB ext4 root partition, and a 1.13 GB FAT32 partition mounted at /boot/efi. The Ubuntu installation completed, and the firmware boot menu lists Ubuntu, Fedora, and Windows Boot Manager. However, selecting Ubuntu leads to Windows Recovery instead of GRUB or Ubuntu, and Windows Boot Manager also sometimes enters recovery. I'm concerned that multiple EFI partitions or incorrect boot entries may have confused the boot process, or that one Linux installation altered the Windows EFI files. What is the safest way to inspect and repair the EFI and bootloader configuration without deleting Windows, and how can I create a reliable boot menu for Windows, Ubuntu, and Fedora?
3 Answers
Windows should generally be installed before Linux, and it’s worth checking whether the machine has more than one EFI system partition or an unusually small one. Temporarily disabling Secure Boot can also help when diagnosing bootloader problems. As a fallback, a Windows-based boot manager can chain-load Linux, but it’s better to understand the partition layout first rather than adding more boot entries blindly.
You can inspect and change UEFI boot entries from Linux with efibootmgr. It can show which EFI files each firmware entry points to and let you adjust the boot order or remove stale entries. Be careful, though—without seeing the actual partition and EFI details, it’s difficult to say which entry is wrong. Running lsblk and checking the mounted EFI partition would help identify whether you have duplicate EFI system partitions or incorrect files.
I ended up following a repair walkthrough and got the boot process working, so checking the firmware entries and EFI files was the right direction.
Since Ubuntu was installed last, boot into Ubuntu and run update-grub so it can search for the available operating systems and rebuild the menu. If that doesn’t produce a normal selection screen, boot from a live environment and inspect the disks with lsblk before making further changes. Another option is to use a UEFI boot manager such as rEFInd, but avoid repeatedly creating or deleting entries until you know which EFI partition contains the valid Windows and Linux loaders.
In my case, the problem turned out to be a firmware setting rather than the Linux installation. Secure Boot was enabled, and changing the relevant BIOS settings made the entries behave normally.