Help wanted to boot into Windows 11 after installing Fedora 42

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1

Hello All,

I installed Fedora 42 (KDE) on my laptop and this is the first time I am trying Fedora. Unfortuantely after installing Fedora, I am not able to boot into Windows 11. My laptop is now directly booting into Fedora without showing Grub menu for selecting the OS. Previously I had Kubuntu on my laptop and I was able to select the OS. After searching in internet, I tried some commands but I have no success. Can anyone of you help me ?

Following are the outputs while running some of the commands. At the end you can see the output of kparted tool

user@fedora:~$ sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
[sudo] password for user:
Generating grub configuration file …
Adding boot menu entry for UEFI Firmware Settings …
done

user@fedora:~$sudo os-prober #returned nothing

user@fedora:~$ efibootmgr
BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout: 0 seconds
BootOrder: 0000,0003,2002,2001,2003
Boot0000* Fedora HD(1,GPT,f845402c-15bb-4d68-ac70-c426255e82c8,0x800,0x82000)/\EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi
Boot0001* EFI PXE 0 for IPv4 (00-00-00-00-00-00) PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1f,0x6)/MAC(000000000000,0)/IPv4(0.0.0.0,0,DHCP,0.0.0.0,0.0.0.0,0.0.0.0)RC
Boot0002* EFI PXE 0 for IPv6 (00-00-00-00-00-00) PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1f,0x6)/MAC(000000000000,0)/IPv6([::],0,Static,[::],[::],64)RC
Boot0003* Fedora HD(1,GPT,f845402c-15bb-4d68-ac70-c426255e82c8,0x800,0x82000)/\EFI\fedora\shim.efiRC
Boot2001* EFI USB Device RC
Boot2002* EFI DVD/CDROM RC
Boot2003* EFI Network RC

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2

pls post output of sudo find /boot/efi/EFI/

There should be a directory Microsoft with the boot loaders

a boot entry then looks something like this: (here the efi partition is the 2nd partition on the drive)

Boot0002* Windows Boot Manager HD(2,GPT,d7beee94-cfdb-4c29-9c68-59b26b57be57,0x200808,0x82008)/\EFI\MICROSOFT\BOOT\BOOTMGFW.EFI

d7beee94-cfdb-4c29-9c68-59b26b57be57 is the PARTUUID of the EFI partition
see Boot0000 on your system

3

It seems there is no Microsoft folder. Do I need to reinstall Windows ? Actually I have some installs in my Windows partition, so didn’t want to reinstall.

$ sudo find /boot/efi/EFI/
/boot/efi/EFI/
/boot/efi/EFI/BOOT
/boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/BOOTIA32.EFI
/boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI
/boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/fbia32.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/fbx64.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/fedora
/boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg
/boot/efi/EFI/fedora/BOOTIA32.CSV
/boot/efi/EFI/fedora/BOOTX64.CSV
/boot/efi/EFI/fedora/gcdia32.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/fedora/gcdx64.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grubia32.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grubx64.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/fedora/mmia32.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/fedora/mmx64.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/fedora/shim.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/fedora/shimia32.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/fedora/shimx64.efi

4

how did that happen?

I guess you need to boot a win install medium and do a boot loader recovery/repair.
This should copy the missing files.

please post output of lsblk -f

5

I am not sure how did this happen.

Here is the output

$ lsblk -f
NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
zram0 swap 1 zram0 c67c9bbb-1a83-41e4-91ad-7e346b64de3f [SWAP]
nvme0n1
├─nvme0n1p1 vfat FAT16 SYSTEM_DRV 6346-C849 232.5M 11% /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2
├─nvme0n1p3 ntfs Windows-SSD AA66EA1566E9E255
├─nvme0n1p4 ext4 1.0 Fedora 8c95a364-f340-4190-ac36-5bd3606a4c52 163.7G 12% /
├─nvme0n1p5 ntfs WINRE_DRV 0A7AEA657AEA4CCF
└─nvme0n1p6 ntfs NTFS-Share 482754FA02704169

6

it seems that your windows partition is not encrypted.
You will need to start WindowsRE (windows recovery environment) and let it fix start-up problems. You need to boot a windows install media and perform the recovery. My guess is that the WINRE_DRV partition is not bootable either without the bootloaders.

7

Thanks. I will check internet how to do that on my Lenovo laptop.

After installing windows, I think I might lose fedora. How to bring fedora back ? What are the next steps?

9

You don’t have to install windows. You boot the install media and there is an option to do recovery. It should re-create the Microsoft folder and files and leave everything else in place.

you can also copy the files in /boot/efi/EFI/ to an external medium, just in case.

10

What is the advantage of copying the files in /boot/efi/EFI/ ? How will I later paste those files back ?

11

don’t worry about that yet. The EFI partition is a simple vfat ((fat32) filesystem.

12

Thanks a lot for the guidance. I fixed the issue

  1. I followed the steps mentioned in this video except I didnt format the EFI drive mentioned at time 13:20 to keep the fedora EFI files - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ17JrgFFhw
  2. After that the laptop booted directly to windows. Then I went to BIOS and changed the boot order i.e first boot as Fedora instead of Windows.
  3. Inside Fedora, I ran the commands “sudo os-prober” and “efibootmgr” to check if my windows is detected.
  4. I ran this command to show windows menu in Grub “sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg”