Salix Forums

Hi
I'm trying to set up a new laptop (Sony Vaio) to dual boot Salix 14.1 and Windows 8.
This seems to be something of a struggle on a UEFI platform.
I disabled secure boot mode, partitioned appropriately and have successfully installed each OS appropriately.
However, I can't seem to get a choice when booting.
ELILO is apparently a one system loader.
I tried GRUB2, but got an error about not supporting the windows loader.
What to do?
After installing salix, it automatically launches with no issue.
I found that if I hit escape then enter during load, the system switches to load windows.
But then I can't figure out how to get salix back without reinstalling.
It seems to wipe the load salix command from the EFI partition.
Any suggestions for a solution or work around?
thanks!

Without having any personal experience with UEFI, I know from discussions that:

* ELILO does not support booting windows. Probably neither does grub2.
* ELILO does support booting multiple linux distributions. You just have to create an appropriate elilo.conf for that. Here's an example (by laprjns) that boots several different salix installations: https://dpaste.de/OkCq
* There is a key/key combination when your system boots that will let you choose which UEFI loader to use, the windows one or ELILO if ELILO is installed. That key/key combination is probably different in every system.
* You can use efibootmgr to manage different UEFI loaders. So you can use this to switch between the windows loader and ELILO.

Thanks for your response.
I tried using efibootmgr to select the OS I want to boot.
As before, after install I can restart Salix over and over with no problem.
I tried using efibootmgr bootnext to tell efi to boot windows one time only, then return to booting Salix first.
It didn't work out that way.
It did load Windows on the next startup like I asked.
But then as before, once Windows starts once, it seems to delete Salix from the efi list and I can't ever find it again.
Then I must reinstall and try again from square one.
Any other suggestions?
I've been using Salix for several years now and really love how bomber it is. I'd really like to get it dual loaded onto my new machine.

For anyone else working on a Dual boot for Salix/Windows 8 on a UEFI system,
rEFind Boot Manager is a great option.
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/getting.html
I loaded a rEFind iso on a USB flash using uNetbootin and it reliably detects and loads either system for me.
Later I'll work on getting it installed to the EFI partition so I don't need to use a flash drive, but for now it's doing exactly what I wanted.