Machine: Alienware Aurora | Zorin OS 17 | Kernel 6.17.0-35-generic | RTX 5060 Ti
The symptom
After every cold shutdown, PANTHEON (my Alienware Aurora) would hang on boot and require Ctrl+Alt+Del to get going. Once I hit that, it booted into Zorin fine every time. Annoying as hell and went on for weeks.
What I tried that didn't work
Deleting ghost EFI entries with efibootmgr (sudo efibootmgr -b 0000 -B etc.). Worked temporarily — but after every reboot, Boot0000 and Boot0001 came right back. Whack-a-mole. The Dell/Alienware UEFI firmware auto-regenerates fallback boot entries by scanning for any drive with a \EFI\Boot\BootX64.efi on it. It's "helpful." It is not helpful.
The actual fix — two parts, both required
PART 1 — Disable os-prober in GRUB
os-prober was finding my old dead Windows Boot Manager on a secondary NVMe (KIOXIA) and adding it to GRUB on every update-grub. GRUB then hung trying to probe an unbootable Windows partition on every boot.
In /etc/default/grub, uncomment and set:
GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true
Then run sudo update-grub and confirm the output says "os-prober will not be executed" with NO "Found Windows Boot Manager" line.
PART 2 — Disable ghost drives in Dell BIOS boot sequence
Hit F2 at POST (mash it early — Dell rushes through). Go to Boot Sequence. You'll see checkboxes for every drive with a valid EFI partition. Uncheck everything except Zorin OS. Save as custom user settings. Apply and exit.
Important: Don't delete BootX64.efi from any drive that has Dell recovery files on it. Just uncheck it in BIOS. Dell recovery runs from firmware (F12), not GRUB — it doesn't need to be in the boot sequence.
Why both parts are needed
Part 1 alone — BIOS still has the drives checked, still hangs.
Part 2 alone — os-prober still rewrites Windows into GRUB on every update, GRUB still hangs probing it.
Together — zero hesitation. PANTHEON boots straight to Zorin instantly.
Result
Boot was so fast after the fix we couldn't even get back into BIOS to double-check. That's the win.
— Silent (NIGHTMARE Workshop) + Unit-7
Nampa, Idaho | 2026-06-29