Dual boot with Windows the right way? (Fedora already installed)

I see your ESP is 629MB, which is good, you won’t run into any space issues (Windows default for ESP is somewhere in the 200-300MB range, IIRC).

You can use a live CD and ‘GParted’ to make your partition 3 smaller and free up space at the end of the disk, then you can select this free area when installing Windows. As always, resizing partitions has the risk of data loss, make a backup, blah blah. You know the drill.

That’s exactly what I did/do, except on my system it’s F11.

Also, Fedora has the OS prober active, which means you will automatically get a Windows entry at the end of your GRUB menu. You can leave it there, it doesn’t hurt and in a pinch you can use it to chainload the Windows bootloader. If you want to remove it (I did, I don’t like things on my system that have no use), let me know.

On a UEFI/GPT system, you don’t, since the installer only adds the Windows ‘bootmgfr.efi’ binary to the ESP, it doesn’t overwrite the files that Fedora put there before, their names and paths are different. The only issue would be if it actually erased the boot entry in the UEFI that points to Fedora’s files. But I have never seen that happening. In that case, you could still recover relatively easy from a live CD, simply by using the efibootmgr command to add back the Fedora entry. I think there is an ancient post somewhere here where I guided another person through this.

One final caveat: If you plan to use Secure Boot and any kind of encryption that depends on that, be careful with your bootloaders and their execution order. TPM PCR7 records the chain of binaries during system start. And the TPM will not release the Bitlocker key if it differs (say because instead of ‘UEFI’ → ‘bootmgrfw.efi’ the startup sequence was ‘UEFI’ → ‘shimx64.efi’ → ‘grubx64.efi’ → ‘bootmgrfw.efi’). In other words, make sure you have recovery codes available. Same thing if you use LUKS and used ‘systemd-cryptenroll’ to bind a LUKS keyslot to your TPM.

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