I have an Acer Nitro 17 configured to dual-boot across two NVMe drives: Linux Mint and Bazzite share the first drive, while Windows 11 is installed alone on the second drive. I installed rEFInd as my boot menu because I prefer its interface over GRUB, and the setup worked reliably for more than a year.
After leaving the laptop unused for a couple of months, I installed a large batch of Windows updates. During the required restarts, the system stopped showing rEFInd and booted directly into Windows. After shutting down completely and disconnecting power, I checked the firmware settings and found that Windows Boot Manager had been moved to the top of the boot order, even though nobody had changed it manually.
I restored the order to Mint first, Bazzite second, and Windows third. The next boot showed GRUB instead of rEFInd, so it appears that I will need to restore or reinstall rEFInd. Has anyone else experienced Windows updates changing the UEFI boot order or bypassing rEFInd even when Windows is installed on a separate physical drive? I thought using a dedicated drive would prevent this kind of interference.
5 Answers
You could use the firmware's one-time boot menu to select the Linux or rEFInd entry, but that is more of a workaround than a fix. Some people also use the Windows boot selector, although that may not provide the same convenient graphical menu.
Changing the firmware order back to the Linux entry probably restored the distribution's normal EFI loader, which is why GRUB appeared. If rEFInd's files are still on the EFI partition, you may only need to recreate its UEFI entry rather than reinstall everything.
Windows can change the UEFI boot variables during updates. That is different from overwriting the boot sectors on another operating system's drive, so putting Windows on a separate NVMe drive does not necessarily prevent it. Check whether the rEFInd EFI file is still present, then recreate a firmware boot entry pointing to something like EFI/refind/refind_x64.efi. The rEFInd documentation covers this recovery process.
If the small text is the main reason you dislike GRUB, its menu can be customized with a larger font and other visual changes. Still, restoring rEFInd is reasonable if you prefer its interface; changing the bootloader's appearance is optional rather than necessary.
A separate Windows drive mainly protects the Linux partitions and boot files from being altered. It does not stop Windows from placing Windows Boot Manager first in the motherboard's NVRAM boot list. Firmware entries are shared by all installed drives, so an update can still affect which loader starts first.
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