Cannot boot

Ask Fedora
1

My laptop (xiaomi notebook 14 pro 2026) has F44 and Win11 installed. Two days ago, the F44 system cannot boot and the screen shows:

unexpected return from initial read: Volume Corrupt, buffersize 1000

Failed to load image \EFI\fedora\grubx64.efi: Volume Corrupt

start_image() returned Volume Corrupt

Failed to open \EFI\fedora\grubx64.efi - Volume Corrupt

Failed to load image \EFI\fedora\grubx64.efi: Volume Corrupt

start_image() returned Volume Corrupt

startimage failed: Volume Corrupt

Whatā€™s the problem? What can I do to recover the system booting?

2

Sorry to state the obvious, but it sounds like corruption on the EFI partition.

You could try reinstalling the bootloader from a Fedora Live USB using this documentation.

Do you also have problems booting into Windows? If so, itā€™s better to repair Windows first, and then fix Fedora second.

3

You should check drive health and free space on the EFI partition. That can be done using the F44 Workstation Live USB with Gnome Disks. Iā€™ve had multiple instances of Windows 11 updates messing with the EFI partition ā€” did the issue start after a Windows update?

4

Thank you for your reply. I tried according to the documentation you mentioned but the problem remains.

I do not have problem to boot into Windows.

5

It seems this issue start after a Windows update (However, I update F44 almost everyday).

The EFI partition is 273 MB and 186 MB is free as shown in Gnome Disks. When using ā€˜fdisk -lā€™ to check the partition, the system shows

Partition table entries are not in disk order.
GPT PMBR size mismatch (5569555 != 245759999) will be corrected by write.

6

Sorry, in trying the steps mention in the documentation, there is error of ā€œtty: ttyname error: No such deviceā€ when typing ā€œsudo chroot /mntā€. How can I fix it?

7

I donā€™t know, but what happens if you use chroot /mnt without sudo? (The docs donā€™t use sudo.)

8

$ chroot /mnt

chroot: cannot change root directory to ā€˜/mntā€™: Operation not permitted

When there is no sudo, even the mount commands cannot be executed.

9

Interesting - which live USB are you using?

10

F44 live USB

11

Workstation, KDE, ā€¦?

12

workstation

13

Screenshot From 2026-06-15 15-20-20
Screenshot From 2026-06-15 15-20-201478Ɨ248 34.5 KB

So the packages were not installed in fact.

14

Did you mount all of these?

mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount -o bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount -o bind /sys /mnt/sys
mount -o bind /run /mnt/run

I think Iā€™ve seen that ā€œunable to allocate ptyā€ error in cases where /proc wasnā€™t mounted.

15

Yes, I mounted all of these.

16

Screenshot From 2026-06-15 23-15-25
Screenshot From 2026-06-15 23-15-251564Ɨ1174 84.8 KB

Screenshot From 2026-06-15 23-15-34
Screenshot From 2026-06-15 23-15-341564Ɨ1174 158 KB

17

2 points:

  • a bind mount of /dev/pts is missing
  • you donā€™t need sudo after sudo chroot /mnt

at this point:

root@localhost-live:/# exit # Terminates the chroot (if you are still running chroot)
liveuser@localhost-live:~$ sudo mount -o bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts
liveuser@localhost-live:~$ sudo chroot /mnt
root@localhost-live:/# dnf reinstall shim-\* grub2-efi-\* grub2-common
18

Yes, It did! Thank you very much!

19

Great!

Do you know if something has changed in F44 to require this? That documentation is quite frequently recommended and used here, so I am a bit surprised the issue didnā€™t come up before, unless itā€™s a new thing.

Iā€™ll raise a ticket anyway to get the docs updated.

20

I donā€™t think so.
The point is that this doc assume that all the commands are run as root.
Only sudo complains about not seeing a tty.

The simplest is to state heavily at the beginning to become root first, for example
with: sudo -i