Fedora dual boot with another Fedora (Workstation + Budgie)

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1

I have been using Fedora Workstation for two years now. With release of Fedora 40, I wanted to try Budgie spin.

Since I have some free space on my drive, I booted up the Fedora Budgie live iso, and started the installer.

The partitioning is something like this:

n1p1 EFI
n1p2 /boot (Workstation)
n1p3 /root (Workstation)
..
..
n1p6 /boot (Budgie, new)
n1p7 /root (Budgie, new)

Installation was successfully, and it restarted into the new Budgie Desktop.

But now I don’t see the boot entries to boot into my Workstation Desktop…! Help.

The partitions are there, I checked. How do I get entries for both Fedora Desktops in the boot menu?

For now, I’d really like to be able to get back into my Workstation Desktop at least. That’s my work environment.

2

You can edit the file /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg which looks like this

search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=dev fb95e178-2329-4271-b73b-2377ed871b8c                
set prefix=($dev)/grub2

export $prefix
configfile $prefix/grub.cfg

but first run the command lsblk -f and note the UUID of the first /boot file system.

In the file /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg replace the UUID by the UUID you found in the lblks -f command listing. The UUID is for eample fb95e178-2329-4271-b73b-2377ed871b8c which needs to be replaced.

Double check everything is correct before attempting to reboot, as a wrong UUID value can make the system unbootable. Also have the original Live system ready.

Fedora does not really support multibooting different versions of Fedora, so for testing it is better to do the test in a virtual machine for example Gnome Boxes.

2 Likes
3

Thanks, am trying this out now.

4

@vekruse Yes! I got back my main :grinning:.

5

Noted. I was actually past trying, and wanted to start fresh and gradually move over my /home files to the this new installation.

It’s a slight bummer that it’s not properly supported.

Would creating a separate efi partition for the new installation make this work? I saw this suggested in another thread.

It seems the issue is that they are overwriting each other’s grub config and efi files since they use the same “fedora” folder. So if they use different efi partitions entirely, maybe …

6

You can do it with two separate disk units. Two efi partitions (also known as ESP) on one disk unit would be iffy. Maybe it would work, but that is far from certain.

7

Reporting:

It did work. I reinstalled Budgie, asking it to create a separate efi partition (esp) and it installed no problem.

Then I see 2 similarly named boot entries in UEFI menu (Fedora, Fedora), and here it’s a game of pick which is which :smile:.

After selecting though, each opens a differnt grub menu with respective entries for Fedora, or Fedora Budgie.

Using efibootmngr I was able to create new boot menu entries with a different --label. So now I have clearly labeled entries in my UEFI boot menu

  • Fedora (Gnome)
  • Fedora (Budgie)
8

@vekruse Again, thanks for the help! Loosing access to my main installation was about to cause me a panic: )

Thanks to you I could take that safety net your answer provided and eventually found a complete solution.