Hinder mint from updating grub

Hi there,
I run a laptop with mint installed , and now added a second partition with manjaro. manjaro overwrote the grub of mint, so far so good. now i fear when i update mint, it might overwrite grub again (and will make mint unbootable) is there a easy way to prevent that? thank you very much!!

Normally the last-installed (Linux) OS will have control of the bootloader, in this case Manjaro, so whatever changes Mint makes to its own GRUB configuration shouldn’t prevent Manjaro from being listed and bootable via GRUB.

Just make sure to do a sudo update-grub from within Manjaro if you are worried that Mint might have changed something. Worst case is chrooting into the Manjaro install to fix things if it really does get messed up (which IMHO is unlikely).

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thanks a lot! I will do a sudo update-grub from in manjaro. I was not aware that the order of installation plays a role in that, good to know! :slight_smile:

Hi and welcome to the forum :+1:

That should not have happened when you boot in UEFI mode, but i guess your machine has Legacy BIOS only.
Because in UEFI mode all OS’s have their bootloader in a separate “vendor” directory on the ESP.

Mind that it is not that grub.cfg in Mint has been overwritten, it is that Grub has been activated with Manjaro as @BG405 already stated.

You are using efibootmgr wneh I am not mistaken, there all you are saying are 100% correct. But Grub works a little bit different as you know.

The grub of Manjaro, when installed in UEFI mode should be in \EFI\Manjaro\grubx64.efi on the ESP, which should not interfere with the one of Mint…

And it does not, as you stated there on separated paths.
So non of them are overwritten.

What has happened is that the bootmenu of Grub itself seems to be overwritten because the Manjaro one is set to active.
Meaning he does not see the Grub menu layout he normally sees with Mint but a new layout from Manjaro.

I think that is what he is talking about, but that is just a guess.

edited is overwritten to seems to be overwritten…

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Exactly but that is impossible because they both use a separate / and /boot with the actual menu config for the grub to use.
So it is only logical that both grubs display different menu’s when they are not synchronized after installing another OS aside them…

So my educated guess is that the poster did not use UEFI to install, but used the Legacy Boot variant which uses a single Grub in the MBR or \EFI\BOOT\BOOTx64.efi in the ESP :wink:

Your right for some part so I edited it.

But this has nothing to do with UEFI or Legacy I can assure you.

hi thanks for these infos and discussions. I am not really sure how i installed it to be honest, it is a new laptop (tuxedo book xp 15) and it s the first laptop that is uefi capable… unfortunately I dont recall what i have done… ;( but it works for now so i am happy. I will read a bit into the different boot options and modes…

You should be able to determine whether it’s a BIOS/Legacy or (U)EFI system with this command:
[ -d /sys/firmware/efi ] && echo UEFI || echo BIOS
… :wink:

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thanks!! :slight_smile:

I got:

 [ -d /sys/firmware/efi ] && echo UEFI || echo BIOS
UEFI