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I bought a PC with Windows 10 on it, which has a SSD and HDD drive. I attempted to create a multi-boot setup with Windows 10 and Ubuntu 14.04 (the Windows folder is on the SSD, and I wanted the Ubuntu partitions to be on the HDD drive). I tried several times to set up dual-boot (with Ubuntu 15.04, 14.04, Mint 17.3), with no success.

Then I found this suggestion here https://askubuntu.com/questions/339687/dual-boot-goes-to-win8-doesnt-even-show-grub-screen that said to run boot-repair from a Ubuntu LiveCD ( I realise the problem there was different from mine, so I see now this was probably very stupid). Following that, my PC now always boots into UEFI. When I then exit UEFI, the screen goes black for a second and goes straight again into UEFI. The exception is if I press F8 during booting to go into safe boot, then it actually boots properly. I found that after running boot-repair, I now have a efi/ubuntu/shimx64.efi file on the HDD disk as well. (I already tried resetting everything I changed in the UEFI -secureboot, faststartup, etc. - to its defaults)

I would be happy for now with getting my computer to work properly without dual-boot, I don't have much data/many programs on this PC (all backed up as well), and I have the Windows License Key and a Repair Disk to reinstall Windows, so instead of looking for the error and breaking even more I'm considering simply doing a re-install of Windows from the repair disk, with it deleting all the data on the PC, instead of looking for the actual problem.

Would a full reinstall of the OS solve my problem and get rid of the linux distro I seem to have installed, but which is not working? Is there a chance it could cause even more problems? Obviously I'm thankful for other suggestions as well, I just want to be sure not to break it further :)

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A full re-install should fix the problems, but is overkill and in rare circumstances won't do the trick. My first suggestion is knowledge. Here are some pages you might want to read:

With a little knowledge under your hat, you'll be better able to diagnose and fix your problem. I can't give you a simple sure-fire fix because there are too many unknowns. That said, one approach you might try is....

  1. Download the USB flash drive or CD-R version of my rEFInd boot manager.
  2. Prepare a medium from the files you download.
  3. In your firmware, disable Secure Boot (if it's currently enabled). You'll be able to re-enable Secure Boot later.
  4. Boot to rEFInd. It should show you an option to boot Windows, and probably to boot Ubuntu (or whatever Linux distribution you last installed). If the Windows option is missing, then chances are you accidentally wiped out the Windows boot loader at some point. It's possible to recover from this problem, but you'll need Windows recovery media. (You can find these online, but I don't have any pointers handy.) If the Linux option(s) are missing or don't work, you may be able to recover -- or you can just abandon the Linux stuff and try again later.
  5. If you can boot anything at all via rEFInd, you can recover the boot process. The EasyUEFI program may help you do this in Windows. You can use it to adjust the boot order -- push Windows (or whatever you like) to the top of the list. In Linux, you'd use efibootmgr to do the same, but it's a command-line tool that's harder to use. Alternatively, you could install rEFInd to your hard disk. (This is easiest to do from Linux, since there are RPM and Debian packages that will do all the hard work. This approach is also most worthwhile if you can boot both OSes via rEFId and you still want to dual-boot; rEFInd will provide very little value for a single-boot to Windows.)
  6. Once you can boot again, you can re-enable Secure Boot. Note, however, that if you've installed rEFInd, you may need to jump through some extra hoops, as documented here.

Note that there are decision points and variants in this procedure, such as how to handle a failure of rEFInd to detect or boot one or more of your OSes. You may be able to handle those yourself, or you may need to ask for more help. Some specific tools and procedures (like using efibootmgr) will require additional research on your part. A Web search will turn up helpful information for most of these topics.

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  • I've accepted this answer without checking if it works, since I need to think whether right now I'll have the time to learn about all this (I know I should, particularly since you went to such lengths to provide such a detailed answer) or should just do the OS reinstall. The reason why I accept it is that the answer looks as good as one can give (given my vague question/problem description), and as the answer states, there are a lot of variants to the procedure, so even if I fail to get it working again using your tips/resources it it wouldn't necessarily mean the answer is wrong. Real thanks!
    – z_eb
    Dec 17, 2015 at 19:03

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