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In short, Windows creates its own boot entry in UEFI. In my case this is not good because I wanted to have a single entry that takes me directly to my GRUB (where I can also start Windows) and I explain this better in this question.

Anyway, if I delete the Windows entry from within my Linux with efibootmgr -b <boot-id> -B, as already said, Windows will recreate it. Does anyone know how to disable this self-healing function in Windows?

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    Does the presence of this entry actually disturb the boot process or are you just trying to get rid of it in principle? In most firmwares I've seen, it would be enough to set GRUB as the first entry in BootOrder and it would take you directly to your GRUB.
    – grawity_u1686
    Commented Nov 3, 2023 at 5:53
  • Unfortunately, this is a real nuisance. I noticed that when I boot into Windows, it apparently changes the order so that its entry is first, so even though I previously changed the order, every time I boot into Windows this will be overwritten. In that case, I would have unwanted boots directly into Windows instead of GRUB.
    – rhuanpk
    Commented Nov 3, 2023 at 7:15
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    It has been my experience that if you delete the Windows boot entry, Windows will indeed re-create it and place it to the first slot in the boot order; but if you just move the Windows boot entry down in the boot order, Windows will generally not change that back during normal use (major updates to a new Windows 10 release or from Windows 10 -> 11 might be a different situation though).
    – telcoM
    Commented Nov 3, 2023 at 8:42
  • Yeah – if you delete the entry, it'll be re-created and placed first in BootOrder, but on all my dual-boot systems I've never had it move an existing entry in front of Linux... not even during upgrades, as far as I can remember.
    – grawity_u1686
    Commented Nov 3, 2023 at 10:04

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AFAIK it's impossible. The best you can do is to "invalidate" the entry by deleting /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi, assuming /EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi is still a copy of it. (If it has been overwritten by some other bootloader, make sure you revert it first, or have a copy somewhere that your custom grub entry can find it.)

Even the deletion of the file is somewhat "volatile", since it gets recreated in every cumulative update.

Normally you can/should just change your boot order, unless you have multiple sets of Windows Boot Manager in different EFI system partitions for different Windows installations. (In this case the entry would be modifed by each set of WBM when booted; the modification of the entry can/will make it become the first and the boot order, at least with some UEFI firmware.)

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