Today, I attempted to set up a dual boot on my desktop PC with Windows 11 and Fedora Workstation 39. I followed the same steps as I did when I installed it on my Lenovo laptop:
Booted up the Fedora live USB.
Installed Fedora by manually creating the directories like /boot/efi, /, and /swap.
Rebooted the system.
However, I noticed that the Windows Boot Manager option wasn’t appearing in the GRUB list. I read some threads to find a solution, but unfortunately, I ended up breaking GRUB without the ability to access either Windows or Linux.
Consequently, I had to reinstall Windows. Fortunately, I didn’t lose much data, so it wasn’t a significant issue.
I still aim to set up a dual boot on my machine because I prefer using Fedora, especially for programming. I’m curious to understand what went wrong and fix it, if anyone has any ideas. Thanks in advance.
you created a new /boot/efi. Since the system can only use one efi partition that probably negated use of the one already there for windows.
Most users follow the simple instructions.
from within windows shrink the file system by the amount desired for linux, leaving the free space unallocated.
Boot the install media and select the automatic installation
install
Doing this allows fedora to A. use the existing efi partition as /boot/efi since it happily shares that space with windows, and B. create its own partitioning for the OS (/boot as ext4 and the rest as btrfs for / and /home). Swap is not required (and has not been for several years and even more release versions) unless you have a really low amount of RAM (<4GB) because fedora uses virtual swap in RAM as zram.
When the install completes it should show the grub menu during boot and should also have windows as one of the options to select.
Of course it is quite possible to do the same with manually creating the partitions but the automatic procedure is tried and true for reliability over many years.
I use manual since I prefer my /home to be on a raid array using LVM, but the great majority of users are technically inexperienced so the installation is as refined as possible with as little as possible input needed from the user.
To recover you could easily boot to the live install media, use gdisk to remove the partitions you created, then redo the install and allow fedora to do so with automatic partitioning.