The Master Boot Record is what’s used in traditional BIOS firmware as a list of bootloaders stored in the boot partition (or, if written by Windows, in whichever partition is first) of your hard drive. Speaking of MBR, avoid that like the plague.
If you have already fiddled with EasyBCD, don’t worry- the worst it probably did is make a mess in your EFI boot entries by writing things to the MBR. I’ve seen a lot of outdated dual-booting tutorials that recommend EasyBCD, but it is designed to work with traditional BIOS firmware used by Windows 7 and Windows Vista, and it does not work well with newer UEFI firmware (Windows 8, 8.1, or 10).
There are some things that need to be done differently when dual-booting with a UEFI system.įirstly, do not use EasyBCD. UEFI and BIOS are not the same thing a UEFI is not a BIOS, and a BIOS is not a UEFI. I read lots of things from lots of places with instructions for dual-booting with a BIOS system, that talk about UEFI as if it’s just a different kind of BIOS, or an optional layer between BIOS and an OS. Both of these newer operating systems use the new(ish) UEFI firmware system, instead of the traditional BIOS system, which is where most confusions with dual-booting seem to arise. I’ve done this with Windows 10, but it should also work with Windows 8.1.
#DOWNLOAD GRUB BOOTLOADER ISO WINDOWS 10#
It’s also somewhat specific to the hardware in question, which requires more explanation.Īfter a lot of headache, two accidental hard drive reformattings, and lots of frustration with HP’s buggy firmware implementation, I finally got Xubuntu and Windows 10 running nicely side-by-side. This is the longest post I’ve ever made on a StackExchange site, but this process requires a lot of explanation and attention to detail. What do I need to do to get GRUB to be the default bootloader instead of Windows Boot Manager? When dual-booting with Windows 8.1, the Windows Boot Manager always took priority, even after installing GRUB. I’ve upgraded to 8.1, and now I want to dual-boot an Ubuntu distribution with Windows 10. I’ve got an HP Pavilion Touchsmart notebook that came with Windows 8.