Windows 8 and fedora 20 Dual boot in HP

Recently I have moved to fedora 20 and window 8 which showed that HP laptops have a special bios which only allows windows EFI to be loaded as default so even after installing both the OS and making the EFI partition of fedora default the system boots from Windows EFI directory. To get the grub to boot first I did the following steps.

My disk partition are as below. Device           Start          End   Size Type
/dev/sda1         2048       616447   300M Windows recovery environment
/dev/sda2       616448       821247   100M EFI System
/dev/sda3       821248      1083391   128M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sda4      1083392    122882047  58.1G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda5    122882048    123291647   200M EFI System
/dev/sda6    123291648    124315647   500M Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda7    124315648    548470783 202.3G Linux LVM
/dev/sda8    548470784    976771071 204.2G Microsoft basic data

Here I have two EFI partition /dev/sda2 (Windows) and /dev/sda5 (Fedora). As the setting is embedded in HP bios we needed a work around.

So I mounted the partititons first .

mount /dev/sda5 fedora/
mount /dev/sda2 win/

Now we copy the Fedora EFI content to Windows partions as follows

cp -rp fedora/EFI/fedora win/EFI/

In the windows partion you can find a default HP EFI content . Just rename it to some thing else.

Now rename the windows boot loader

mv win/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi  win/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfwB.efi

Now copy the grubloader into the place of windows bootloader

cp win/EFI/fedora/grubx64.efi win/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi

Now recreate the grub.cfg and place it in win/EFI/fedora

grub2-mkconfig -o win/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg

It should be done by now reboot the machine and check it .