Selecting Windows or Linux

Hello,

My Sony laptop was set to tri-boot between Win10, Win7 and Linux Debian. At that time I had a screen that looked similar to this except the options were Win10, Win7, Debian and Safe Mode. The BIOS was set to Legacy so I'm assuming I had a MBR and I believe I set it up using EasyBCD. It might also of been set when the system was Win8.1 before upgrading to Win10.



My drive died and the new drive is formatted GPT with Win10 and Debian. I am wondering how to get this screen to appear while booting so I can choose which operating system I want without using rEFInd or entering the systems firmware.

EasyBCD doesn't seem to work with GPT and I can't see the Debian partitions while in Win10 so I can't assign them a drive letter to run a "BCDEDIT" command. I am thinking the EFI partition must hold the key since I can mount it while in Debian and see various files (grub.efi, bootmgfw.efi etc...) but I have no idea how to work the key??? Everything I do seems to point me directly into Win10 without the above screen which allows me options.

Can someone please help getting that screen back with Debian and Safe Mode as options?

Code:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>bcdedit

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier              {bootmgr}
device                  partition=\Device\HarddiskVolume1
path                    \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi
description             Windows Boot Manager
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {globalsettings}
default                 {current}
resumeobject            {b4e919a2-d74a-11e6-a753-aa16a1802b19}
displayorder            {current}
toolsdisplayorder       {memdiag}
timeout                 5
displaybootmenu         No

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier              {current}
device                  partition=C:
path                    \WINDOWS\system32\winload.efi
description             Windows 10
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {bootloadersettings}
recoverysequence        {b4e919a4-d74a-11e6-a753-aa16a1802b19}
recoveryenabled         Yes
isolatedcontext         Yes
allowedinmemorysettings 0x15000075
osdevice                partition=C:
systemroot              \WINDOWS
resumeobject            {b4e919a2-d74a-11e6-a753-aa16a1802b19}
nx                      OptIn
bootmenupolicy          Standard

C:\WINDOWS\system32>

Code:

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    System             243 MB  1024 KB
  Partition 2    Reserved            16 MB   244 MB
  Partition 3    Primary            194 GB   260 MB
  Partition 4    Recovery           507 MB   195 GB
  Partition 5    Primary            405 GB   195 GB
  Partition 6    Unknown            139 GB   600 GB
  Partition 7    Unknown            116 GB   740 GB
  Partition 8    Unknown             74 GB   857 GB

Partition 3 is Win10
Partition 5 is my Win10 home drive
Partition 6 is home drive in Debian
Partition 7 is Debian OS
Partition 8 is Swap partition

PS... What is that blue screen called? It's hard to google something when you don't know its name...

Immersive boot - bootim.exe in C:\Windows\system32 - but it always surprises me what it shows, as I have the legacy text boot menu, like in Windows 7, so i rarely see it. Here it is in the background offering to "Turn off your PC":



I would ask on a linux forum, the idea is to get an entry on the menu that chainloads (is that right?) the grub menu for linux from the windows menu. and Linux geeks are better at that than Windows geeks!

Yup, that's the way it was working. It would chain load to Debian from the Windows menu...

However, I don't think this is part of boot manager since it doesn't appear until windows is almost booted. Also, I can get the text menu you said by changing this option to yes;

Code:

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier              {bootmgr}
device                  partition=\Device\HarddiskVolume1
path                    \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi
description             Windows Boot Manager
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {globalsettings}
default                 {current}
resumeobject            {b4e919a2-d74a-11e6-a753-aa16a1802b19}
displayorder            {current}
toolsdisplayorder       {memdiag}
timeout                 5
displaybootmenu         No

Immersive boot, thanks, I will look into that...

Immersive boot menu is not well documented - it seem that a subset of WinPE runs a graphical menu-which is a pain in the butt - anything other than the default menu entry sees another warm boot before the selected OS starts I circumvent it by setting a legacy bootmenupolicy with bcdedit

I have linux mint and puppy linux on my boot menu - here are the entries


Real-mode Boot Sector
---------------------
identifier {8440d262-e8ca-11e1-b520-f8ae97c7258e}
device partition=D:
path \linuxmint\winboot\wubildr.mbr
description Linux Mint
locale en-US


Real-mode Boot Sector
---------------------
identifier {fea2ca10-31b8-11e4-a0b0-ac162d586f27}
device partition=E:
path \grldr.mbr
description Start Puppy Linux







Linux mint 13 was installed using mint4win - ubuntu WUBI modified for Mint, Puppy linux with its own windows friendly installer. Both systems live in folders on the NTFS volumes D: and E: as highly compressed image files containing the filesystems.

They are really simple entries as you can see, but they probably won't suit a real grub boot and proper linux partitions with ext2 or ext3 filesystems, so I'm not much more help here.

Code:

They are really simple entries as you can see, but they probably won't  suit a real grub boot and proper linux partitions with ext2 or ext3  filesystems, so I'm not much more help here.

This is the key, if I could assign them a drive letter then my problem would be solved but because the partition isn't recognized in Win10 so no way to assign the drive letter. According to the EasyBCD site, this is a limitation when using GPT so these capabilities are disabled. Maybe I'll look into that mint4win or just delete Debian since I rarely use it these days...