Installing dual boot with Windows 11 Pro issues

Ask Fedora
1

I haven’t created a dual boot system in a number of years. I reinstalled Win11 Pro to the 1st half of my hard drive. I then rebooted into the bios and bounced the UEFI (? usb controller) to 1st position and rebooted the laptop. I was then presented with grub 2.12 prompt and have no idea how to reference the Windows partition or the second half of the hard disk to be used for fedora. What am i doing wrong?

3

(post deleted by author)

4

sorry, this one.

Edited by @glb to reference the English version of the documentation.

5

How do I do these things if I cannot “boot” fedora or get into it somehow? All I have is a working Windows 11 Pro bootable disk. I don’t have an option to try before you install…

6

There is a Using the GRUB2 boot prompt section in that documentation. I think that is supposed to help you out of situations where you’ve lost the grub configuration.

7

I’ll see if it will help me. Confused though how I could havr lost the configuration though…

8

It is quite possible that MS Windows changed or overwrote something on the EFI System Partition. It’s (typically) the first partition on the drive and it will usually be formatted with a FAT32 filesystem. On UEFI systems, that partition is meant to be shared by all operating systems that are installed on that same drive. But how well the operating systems cooperate and avoid clobbering each other’s configuration is another matter.

IIRC, there should be something like a /EFI/Fedora/shimx64.efi executable on the EFI System Partition that you should be able to point your BIOS Firmware at to boot your Fedora Linux OS (assuming MS Windows didn’t overwrite it).

Edit: FWIW, according to the documentation,[1] There might also be a /EFI/BOOT/fbx64.efi “fallback” executable.

  1. ↩︎

9

The problem I’m running into is that the output of the ls command doesn’t match up to what it is in the docs - i have no way to distingush what holds the mbr, windows 11 pro, or the section reserved for the fedora partition. it used to be a simple task to install a system; i’m not too sure any more.

10

You could always run a Fedora live session from a USB drive and use the disks (Gnome) or partition manager (kde) to see what’s what on the internal drive and to edit grub files.

11

The MBR and PBRs are not used anymore. Likewise, “chainload +1” doesn’t work anymore. If you are using UEFI, everything is different.

“You must unlearn what you have learned.” – Yoda