Hello,

I just installed Ubuntu as a second OS on my system on a different drive than my Windows installation. But now, whenever I try and boot the windows installation, I get a blue screen saying that Windows couldn't load winload.exe. This error persists even when I unplug the hard drive that Ubuntu is installed on.

I had this error once before a few weeks ago (When I only had Windows installed), and that time just unplugging all my other hard drives and rebooting worked fine. This fix does not work now.

I'd love to follow the instructions on screen and press F8 to change boot settings or Enter to try again, but both buttons just make the screen refresh and don't actually change anything.

So, I tried to go in Ubuntu and at least recover files from the windows disk, so I could do a clean install of Windows. But then I noticed that Ubuntu didn't have access to the drive.. At first I thought it was because it was ntfs, but then I realized that this made no sense and remembered I had fast boot turned on in Windows (I think that's it), so the drive was locked and I couldn't get in without first disabling that setting in Windows. Too bad I couldn't do that.

Any help with resolving this issue would be greatly appreciated!

Oh, I almost forgot. Here's some specs on the pc:

  • Windows 8.1 Pro (Single user license, not OEM)
  • Windows is installed on a 250GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD
  • Ubuntu is installed on a 500 GB WD hard disk (pretty old disk)

Thanks again!

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I found this youtube according to the comments some of them got the problem some of them didn't maybe you ll lucky?

Qurbani, your link points to this thread.

Cascer, The trouble you are facing is because of windows 8.1 . It has security enabled so you won't be able to run another OS basically, however there is a way around. I had Kali Linux on my pc and installed Windows 8.1 a few days ago. After hours and hours trying to play with grub/windows loader to show me to switch between both and being able to boot into them I found somewhere around google about a program called openBCD(i think it was). Ran it and now it works like a charm I can switch between both. To begin with I'd run gparted (Linux partition program) to check the hard drives and make sure that both OS are still on there(to make sure you havent overwritten windows)). There are some great guides for how to install Ubuntu dual with windows 8.1. But basically in most cases from what I found was that windows 8.1 has some security enabled and in order to be able to dual boot them you have to disable it before installing linux. (wasn't the case for me as I had linux already on, and I am not on ubuntu)

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