Fedora boot drive randomly disappears / reappears

Ask Fedora
1

Hey there!

I am currently dual-booting Fedora Kinoite and Windows 11 on separate boot drives. These have been running without issue for a couple months now, but randomly my Fedora drive doesn’t appear in BIOS and there’s no boot option for it. It seems to be about a 50/50 chance that when I boot, Fedora isn’t an option and does not appear in BIOS, but generally if I restart the computer … it shows back up and works fine.

Some setup info:

  • Asus ROX STRIX B-650E-I (latest BIOS)
  • AMD 9800x3d
  • Radeon 9070XT
  • Samsung 990 NVMEs (1 Kinoite, 1 Windows 11)
  • Drives use UEFI, set with secureboot on, CSM off, fastboot off, standard RAM tunings (no EXPO, that was giving me stability issues.

I originally installed Windows 11 on one drive, then separately installed Fedora Kinoite on the other.

Recently, I upgraded my motherboard and migrated both drives to it without doing new/clean installs. After decrypting the drives and doing setup on my new motherboard, there were originally no issues.

When Kinoite doesn’t show up, I have tried booting to a Kinoite USB and doing the troubleshooter, it tells me no linux install detected.

Any ideas for how to address this weird little glitch, or what might be causing it?

Thanks!!

2

Do you have Fast Boot enabled in BIOS, and/or Fast Startup enabled in Windows?

These are sometimes responsible for devices not being properly initialised at startup.

3

Fastboot is disabled in BIOS.

Fast Startup is disabled in Windows.

4

Are the disks cable connected, SATA drives?

Maybe you damaged the cable when swapping the mainboard, or maybe the cable is not properly seated on the board or the drive. Worth checking.

5

Check efibootmgr output. I used to dual boot Fedora with Windows 11, but had similar issues due to Windows making changes to the Fedora entry, adding PciRoot… stuff at the front and random looking text after the shimx64.efi.

6

All NVME drives here

7

efibootmgr does show that boot order has Windows first, despite me setting otherwise in my BIOS. It looks like something has been added to the .efi files for both windows and fedora?

Suggestions on what to do here?

USER@fedora-kinoite:~$ efibootmgr
BootCurrent: 0001
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0000,0001
Boot0000* Windows Boot Manager  HD(1,GPT,129201d5-eea5-4359-9665-1b41aec82348,0x800,0x64000)/\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi57494e444f5753000100000088000000780000004200430044004f0042004a004500430054003d007b00390064006500610038003600320063002d0035006300640064002d0034006500370030002d0061006300630031002d006600330032006200330034003400640034003700390035007d00000000000100000010000000040000007fff0400
Boot0001* Fedora        HD(1,GPT,666a8cbe-b22b-4d67-84e7-d8215a617e93,0x800,0x12c000)/\EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi0000424f

Edit: The actual .efi file doesn’t have any changes to it:

image
image263×686 29.4 KB

8

I think EFI supports additional data fields shown after the .efi, so it may just be a formatting error.

There should be a way to view/edit the EFI entries in the UEFI/BIOS. In my case, a Windows update changed the Fedora entry. I created a new entry with the original Fedora text and was able to boot Fedora.