Windows 7 hangs at grub's purple screen when dual booting

Question

I have installed a new laptop (Lenovo Z510) for dual boot Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows 7 64 bit. After several trials it now works, but I have a strange effect.

I always enter the Grub purple screen fine. Ubuntu always works. When I want to boot Windows however windows boots fine (I hear the Windows start sound) but I only see a blank, purple Grub like screen. I can operate Windows though, pressing three times the tab key and then enter shuts the PC down successfully.

Sometime a trick works like that: I press just the power key and the PC hibernates. When I switch on the PC afterward and choose Win7 in Grub again everything is working fine, this time with working screen. However I had to find the trick does not always work - maybe whether it works or not is just random :-(

The workaround is quite dirty, what can I do to get rid of it?

Thanks for your help!

Solution 1

I had the exact same problem (I was able to listen to the windows login sound even when the only think I saw was the grub purple screen).

Luckily I found a workaround:

• move the file 30_os-prober to 06_os-prober (because I wanted the windows entries to be listed first)
• run sudo upgrade-grub

And now it works fine every time... I do not not understand why and I have not tried to isolate if update-grub is enough or not.

Solution 2

So this sort of worked for me. I moved the /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober file to /etc/grub.d/06_os-prober, then ran update-grub.

This puts windows on the top of the grub boot screen. Then I tried many different options to start, restart from windows and ubuntu and what I have noticed so far is if I let the boot via grub, proceed by it self with no manual intervention and let the default 10s pass, it will boot into windows with no issues.

However if I manually select the "Windows 7" option in the grub boot screen using my cursor and then hit enter, I get the dreaded purple screen in windows.

Solution 3

In my experience, this issue can appears if Video card drivers were not installed into the Windows system properly (Win 7 in my case).

The steps which helped me :

1. Boot into Ubuntu

2. Edit /etc/default/grub and uncomment the line GRUB_TERMINAL=console, then execute sudo update-grub

3. Restart and boot into Windows

4. Install / Reinstall Video card drivers (Intel HD + nVidia in my case)

5. Restart and boot into Ubuntu again

6. Restore /etc/default/grub to the previous state (comment GRUB_TERMINAL=console), execute sudo update-grub again.

Done.

Tested on:
Dell Inspiron 15 3000 Series, Os: Windows 7 x64, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS x64

Comments

[micnic]

I have same problem with 13.10, hope we'll find a solution

[TheOneWithNoClue]

The problem is still there. I have not found a solution yet. Whenever the problem shows up I just reboot and try again...

[TuKsn]

Did you try Boot-Repair ?

[McMutton]

Here is the purple screen I was seeing and this answer was the solution for my case. Moving the grub entry as suggested in other answers had no effect.

[jahackbeth]

This is the only thing that worked for me! The issue occurred after windows tried to update itself and then got stuck on a purple screen after the grub boot options.