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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!

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  • I have same problem with 13.10, hope we'll find a solution
    – micnic
    Mar 15, 2014 at 14:54
  • The problem is still there. I have not found a solution yet. Whenever the problem shows up I just reboot and try again... Apr 6, 2014 at 14:57
  • Did you try Boot-Repair ?
    – TuKsn
    May 10, 2014 at 23:32

7 Answers 7

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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.

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  • 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.
    – KnD
    Jul 24, 2020 at 17:54
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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.

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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

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  • 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.
    – McMutton
    Feb 15, 2018 at 12:53
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I had the same problem I noticed I was booting to the 1st partition, the windows boot partition ~200mb When I instead selected the partition with Windows system installed on it, the boot proceeded normally

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Had the same issue. It's more to do with Legacy v/s UEFI Boot mode. Win 7 is installed in Legacy mode while it's other way round for win 8.1 and above. If both win 10 and Ubuntu are installed in Legacy mode (for eg. if win 7 upgraded to 10). This issue may come. For me just disabling legacy mode from BIOS and enabling it again worked fine.

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Well I have found a temporary solution to the problem... just go into your BIOS settings and set Windows bootloader to boot first (before Ubuntu)...

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I had a similar problem when upgrading my dual boot Lenovo T440s from Windows 7 to Windows 10. It always worked fine with Win7 until the upgrade rebooted to start Win10. I then only saw the purple screen.

I booted into Ubuntu 14.04 and modified /etc/default/grub to uncomment GRUB_TERMINAL=console to disable graphical mode and changed GRUB_DEFAULT=0 to 3. After I ran sudo update-grub and rebooting, Win10 booted just fine. However, I then re-enabled graphical mode, changed default back to 0, ran sudo update-grub, and Win10 still booted fine.

So I think just running sudo update-grub solved my problem.

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