Black screen when booting to Windows

[Thom]

I recently dual booted Arch Linux alongside an existing Windows 10 setup, and installed refind to be my bootloader. It's a UEFI system, and I have followed the directions on the Arch wiki. I can boot into refind, and frmo there I can boot into Arch just fine. Booting to Windows, however, I see the spinning dots followed quickly by a blacks screens and messages on the monitors saying "No Signal".

If I enter the BIOS on startup and tell the computer to boot directly with Windows Boot Manager, then Windows comes up fine, so the Windows installation is fine.

As the Arch wiki suggested I set the following in my refind.conf.

use_graphics_for +,windows

Without graphics enabled, I see this after booting:

Starting bootmgfw.efi
Using load options ''
_

So it looks like refind is correctly identifying the efi file, but doesn't get any farther than that.

Any ideas?

[Roderick W. Smith]

If you're seeing the spinning dots, that means that it is getting farther than rEFInd identifying the Windows boot loader -- the Windows boot loader has taken control of the computer. (Those spinning dots are not produced by rEFInd -- they're produced by the Windows boot loader or something further up the Windows chain.)

I've seen a couple other reports of this problem, but I've never seen it myself, which makes it difficult to diagnose. I suspect that any workaround within rEFInd will require ditching rEFInd's GUI. To that end, here's a test version, which bypasses the GUI and provides a text-only interface:

https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind-bin-0.11.4.1.zip

Please try that version and tell me if it works. If it does, please also try setting textonly in refind.conf. (The textonly option kicks in only after GUI mode has been activated, but switches back to text mode.) Other reports of this problem indicate that textonly doesn't help. If the test version I've provided does work, I can either add a new option or, more likely, modify the existing textonly option to bypass initializing graphics mode.

If you want rEFInd's GUI and a functioning display in Windows, then you'll either need to look for a workaround by poking at rEFInd's code yourself or you'll need to try options within Windows. You often have a choice of which driver to use -- options are available from Microsoft, from the video card manufacturer, and from the video chipset's manufacturer; and there may be different versions available, too.

[Scott Kerkvliet]

For future use:

Was running into this issue as well, and was unable to get it to work with the test version or the textOnly parameter. However, disabling the Intel integrated graphics in my BIOS (using a graphics card) worked!