EFI: how to dual boot without esc, F9 ?

[sean darcy]

On 07/14/2014 01:55 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>
> On Jul 14, 2014, at 7:45 AM, sean darcy <seandarcy2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> New HP laptop, W 8.1, EFI boot. I've installed F20. The laptop boots to Windows. If I hit ESC and f9, I get:
>>
>> - OS Boot Manager
>> - Fedora 20 [HDD SERIAL NUMBER]
>> - Boot from EFI file
>>
>> When I choose Fedora, I get the grub2 manager, which includes a choice for windows.
>
>> F10 in the gives me boot options, but only for devices.
>>
>> How can I get the laptop to boot to the grub2 manager without esc, f9 ??
>
> What do you get for 'efibootmgr -v' ?
>
> What should have happened is the installer calls efibootmgr to set the Fedora boot entry in NVRAM to be first in the bootorder so that the firmware uses GRUB straight away by default. The problem of course is there's a long standing bug with the Windows boot entry in GRUB so I think it doesn't work on Fedora 20. It should work on Fedora 21 (or by manually upgrading f20 grub2-tools to the f21 version, and running grub2-mkconfig).
>
>
> Chris Murphy
>

Well that was exciting:

  efibootmgr -v
BootCurrent: 0003
Timeout: 2 seconds
BootOrder: 2001,0000,3000,0002,0003,2002,2003
Boot0000* Windows Boot Manager 
HD(2,c8800,82000,b75fbdf8-d691-411e-8c4d-bc2e5b5e8898)File(\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi)(invalid 
optional data length)
*** Error in `efibootmgr': double free or corruption (out): 
0x00007fff63e991e0 ***
======= Backtrace: =========
/lib64/libc.so.6[0x3f61c75cff]
/lib64/libc.so.6[0x3f61c7cff8]
efibootmgr[0x407088]
efibootmgr[0x402308]
/lib64/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xf5)[0x3f61c21d65]
efibootmgr[0x403121]
======= Memory map: ========
..........
Boot0001* USB Hard Drive (UEFI) - Generic Flash DiskAborted

MBR I sort of got. EFI, I know nothing. Is using F21 grub2-tools safe? 
I'd really hate to brick this machine.

sean