I have an Acer Nitro 17 set up to dual-boot across two NVMe drives: Linux Mint and Bazzite share the first drive, while Windows 11 is installed by itself on the second drive. I installed rEFInd as the graphical boot menu because I prefer it to GRUB, and the setup worked normally for more than a year.
After leaving the laptop unused for a couple of months, I ran a large batch of Windows updates. During the required reboots, the system began going directly into Windows instead of showing rEFInd. Even after shutting down completely and disconnecting power for several minutes, the behavior continued.
When I checked the firmware settings, Windows Boot Manager had been moved to the top of the boot order. I restored the previous order—Mint first, Bazzite second, and Windows third—but the next boot showed GRUB instead of rEFInd. It looks like the rEFInd firmware entry may have been removed or replaced.
Has anyone else experienced Windows updates changing the UEFI boot order or removing a rEFInd entry even when Windows is installed on a separate physical drive? Do I need to reinstall rEFInd, or can I recreate its UEFI boot entry manually?
3 Answers
Windows updates can sometimes promote Windows Boot Manager or alter UEFI boot entries. A separate drive helps prevent Windows from writing into Linux partitions, but it does not necessarily prevent firmware boot-order changes. Check whether the rEFInd files are still present on the EFI System Partition. If they are, you may only need to recreate the firmware entry pointing to something like EFI/refind/refind_x64.efi, then move that entry back to the top.
The fact that selecting the Linux entries now loads GRUB suggests the Linux installations are still intact; the problem may be limited to the missing or reordered rEFInd entry. Reinstalling rEFInd is one option, but first inspect the EFI partitions and verify whether its loader files remain. Firmware settings can also display old entries inconsistently, so recreating the entry with a Linux boot-repair tool or from the command line may be enough.
If the main issue is readability rather than functionality, GRUB can be customized with a larger font, different theme, or graphical background. That will not restore rEFInd, but it can make the existing Linux boot menu easier to use while you repair the rEFInd installation.
Putting Windows on its own NVMe drive protects the Linux files from most installer-related mistakes, but the motherboard firmware boot list is shared by all drives. That shared UEFI configuration can still be changed independently of the partition layout.