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Daniel Schreij
Asked: 2018-09-07 22:55:18 +0800 CST

How can I prevent grub updates from resetting my EFI bootorder

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I'm using Clover as my first and default bootloader. If Ubuntu is selected there, then Grub is activated (AFAIK there is no way to skip this step, I don't really use Grub at all, so I might as well remove it). My system uses UEFI, so I've set my preferred bootorder using

sudo efibootmgr -o XXXX,YYYY,ZZZZ

which works fine, until Grub is updated again. During the update my UEFI boot order settings are overwritten by the Grub defaults, with which Grub is always set as the first bootloader to be reached.

Is there anyway to persist the boot order that I have set up and prevent Grub from changing it back to its own defaults?

grub2 dual-boot bootloader uefi grub-efi

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer
    sudo dpkg-reconfigure grub-efi-amd64

    For the first couple of questions accept the existing values (just press Enter) but when it comes to this, select No:

     +----------------------| Configuring grub-efi-amd64 |-----------------------+
 |                                                                           |
 | GRUB can configure your platform's NVRAM variables so that it boots into  |
 | Debian automatically when powered on. However, you may prefer to disable  |
 | this behavior and avoid changes to your boot configuration. For example,  |
 | if your NVRAM variables have been set up such that your system contacts   |
 | a PXE server on every boot, this would preserve that behavior.            |
 |                                                                           |
 | Update NVRAM variables to automatically boot into Debian?                 |
 |                                                                           |
 |                    <Yes>                       <No>                       |
 |                                                ^^^^                       |
 +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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  2. The answer from Tobia worked for me on one machine, but on a different machine I found that grub-pc was installed instead of grub-efi-amd64. When I tried dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc, I found that it doesn't always ask this question, despite it sometimes being used in EFI mode. So getting to the crux of where this setting lives, I found that they are both actually modifying the debconf database entry named grub2/update_nvram. Thanks to this article, I found that you can directly set this variable with the following command:

    echo "set grub2/update_nvram false" | debconf-communicate

    You can confirm the setting this way:

    echo "get grub2/update_nvram" | debconf-communicate

    ...which will output the current value of the variable.

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