How to add Ubuntu to the Windows 8 Boot Menu with a GPT Harddrive

Question

I would like to know how to add Ubuntu to the Windows 8 Boot Menu using bcdedit.

I have UEFI with secure boot enabled and both OS's can be booted from the UEFI boot menu by pressing F9.

I also have GPT hard-drive partitioning.

Please do not suggest adding windows to grub as I have already done this, windows every now and again whilst updating will change the default boot manager back to the Windows one. I know there is a work around to stop windows from doing this but I'm not interested in that as it is a messy hack.

Also dont't suggest EasyBCD or Visual BCD because these programs do not work with GPT yet (as far as I'm aware).

So the only route I think I can take is to manually enter the information into the BCD store (which is now in the unmapped EFI partition) using bcdedit but i'm not sure how to do this. I did get this working once before by copying the windows boot MANAGER entry and editing it for Ubuntu, but when i tried to do that again it didn'twork so i must be missing something.

Solution

There is no known way until now for adding a foreign, non-Windows UEFI/EFI loader to be chain loaded by Windows boot manager (Windows 7/8).

Regarding Visual BCD Editor - it is UEFI capable. You can create UEFI loaders for Windows 7/8.

Chain loading foreign, non-Windows OSs is possible for MBR disk scheme. You use a so called boot sector loader chaining over partition boot sector or MBR code of foreign system. You can see here how it goes.

UPDATE: (01.jun 2014)

There is a new tool for Windows 8.1/7/Vista called BootNext which allows direct booting of Linux(Ubuntu) from Windows on UEFI firmware.

Comments

[Pavel]

This BCDEdit manual could be handy: computerperformance.co.uk/win8/windows8-bcdedit.htm Hard to tell what exactly you cld be missing when editing the BCD manually based on the information provided, and honestly, at this point it becomes more of a "askwindows8" question.) But you'll probably be better off with the "workaround" bcz the new Win8 loader 1st takes time to load half of the Win OS, then gives you the menu, then, if you don't select to load Windows 8, reboots and loads Linux. Can't believe the kind of gimmicks MS has resorted to to make Win boot times SEEM shorter.

[solsTiCe]

The issue here is "Why does windows change the default boot manager ?".