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Install Linux distros without grub??
(lemmy.world)
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I tried to use rEFInd years ago on my first UEFI machine, gave up and ended with GRUB... maybe it was just a crap setup and I need to try again...
But, how about backing up just the boot sectors / EFI partition with a
dd
command and then just restoring it again? Not a slick solution, I agreeTBH, if a distro doesn't give me options during install then I'd probably stop there as every update to GRUB could be automatically installed and blat your machine again.
Unfortunately that does nothing on a UEFI system. There's no boot record any more (just a partition table) and even if there were (ie it's an MBR drive instead of GPT) it would be ignored under UEFI.
But in the case of rEFInd and GRUB, both would actually happily live side by side, what's changing is just the default bootloader selection in the UEFI. So all you need to go into your UEFI settings and point it back to your choice of bootloader. No need to worry about reinstalling the bootloader, messing with config files, etc.