Triple boot with Windows 8

Question

while ago I bought a acer aspire e1 laptop with windows 8 on one partition, yesterday I installed ubuntu 12.10 and fedora 18 but when booting up I don't see ubuntu and fedora OS to select, it takes me straight to windows 8.

In the BIOS boot order menu there is windows boot manager and fedora (there was ubuntu but after installing fedora, there is only fedora and windows boot manager. probably boot record has been overwritten )

when I changed boot order to fedora first, fedora grub shows up and it has Ubuntu and Fedora but no windows 8.

I installed a program called easyBCD and it shows all 3 operating systems on boot loader.

There are a total of 4 entries listed in the bootloader.

Default: HDD: 
Timeout: 30 seconds
EasyBCD Boot Device: C:\

Entry #1
Name: Fedora
BCD ID: {301264ca-bb10-11e2-bead-806e6f6e6963}
Device: \Device\HarddiskVolume10
Bootloader Path: \EFI\fedora\shim.efi

Entry #2
Name: ubuntu
BCD ID: {856cccb0-bab3-11e2-bea9-806e6f6e6963}
Device: \Device\HarddiskVolume2
Bootloader Path: \EFI\ubuntu\shimx64.efi

Entry #3
Name: HDD: 
BCD ID: {default}
Device: \Device\HarddiskVolume2
Bootloader Path: \EFI\ubuntu\grubx64.efi

Entry #4
Name: Windows 8
BCD ID: {current}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.efi

any help?

Answer 1

Try the grub bootloader editor:

http://ksmanis.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/grub2-bootloader-editor-v0-4-5/

The newer bootloader must not have been initialised properly.

Answer 2

If you have Windows 8 on a UEFI system, then you could add this menu item to the script 40_custom. I did this successfully on my UEFI win8 triple boot with fedora and Ubuntu.

Warning: This is UEFI style, not BIOS style. os-prober (used in generating grub.cfg) often doesn't generate UEFI style menu items correctly, so some menu items for other operating systems will give you errors.

menuentry 'Windows 8' {
 search --fs-uuid --no-floppy --set=root 28ED-4D40
 chainloader (${root})/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
}

• replace the 28E... with the UUID of your EFI partition that you can find using the blkid command in linux terminal.
• change windows 8 to whatever you want to see in the menu - be sure it has single (') quotes, not double (").
• rename 40_custom to 09_custom (less than 10) to put the item at the top, if you always want to have Windows 8 as your default.
• use terminal to edit files eg. # gedit /etc/grub.d/40_custom
• if your boot menu doesn't change after you update the grub with grub2-mkconfig -o ..., check that you are updating to the active grub.cfg", eg. /boot/grub2 or /boot/efi/EFI/boot/fedora/grub.cfg, etc.