I recently built a new PC featuring a 9900x CPU and an X870e MSI motherboard, and I'm attempting to set up a dual boot with Windows and Linux Mint. I've got four drives configured: a 4TB NVMe drive for Windows, a 1TB NVMe drive for Mint, and two 1TB HDDs for extra storage formatted in ExFAT for compatibility between operating systems.
So far, I've created a bootable USB with Mint 22.3 using Ventoy and booted into the live environment without any trouble. When I select to install Mint, I go into the advanced options to specify the correct drive for the installation. After the installation process completes successfully, I restart the machine, but it boots directly into Windows instead of showing GRUB.
When I try to boot from the Mint drive, it leads me to a GRUB terminal instead of the menu I expect. In previous setups, I've had no issues at all, as it would typically take me straight to GRUB. Any ideas on how to resolve this?
3 Answers
You might want to consider uninstalling GRUB and trying out rEFInd instead; many users have found it easier to manage. You can also check out MX Linux if you're up for a different distro! [Check it out here](https://mxlinux.org/).
Honestly, dual booting can be a hassle. Windows has this annoying habit of messing with partitions and boot loaders. If you can avoid it, you might save yourself some headaches!
Did you manually partition and specify the EFI partition when installing Mint? If you let it use the defaults, it may have installed GRUB into the Windows EFI partition instead. A quick fix is to boot with a SuperGrub2 disk, and if you can start Mint, you can run some commands to repair GRUB. Try these: 'sudo update-grub' and 'sudo grub-install /dev/sdX', where 'X' refers to your drive with the Linux EFI. Then just configure os-prober accordingly.
That aligns with my suspicions! I also ran into a phantom UEFI entry on another disk. I ended up booting from a live USB, using GParted to delete all EFI partitions except the Windows one, reset my GRUB file to default, and reinstalled Mint. Finally got it to work!