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?
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…
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.
I’ll see if it will help me. Confused though how I could havr lost the configuration though…
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.
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.
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.
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
sudo dnf install grub-customizer
“No match for argument: grub-customizer”
Didn’t grub-customiszer fall out of favour back along in favour of “doing it properly” (editing config files directly)?
See for example Grub Customizer Messed Up Grub - How Reinstall Grub Properly?
It is even worse on Fedora which have a somewhat frequent update of the grub2 packages. Grub Customizer may appear to work fine at first, but after several updates of grub2, the grub2 configuration gets messed up.
I have 2 Dell systems that came with Windows. Grub2 has 2 ways to specify the disk layout, see: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/system-install-efirc-instead-of-efi-file-grub2/138308
On both my systems, Windows updates rewrote the lines with Boot0001* Fedora HD(1,GPT,…) to a broken version of the PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(...) format. I was able to restore the correct HD(…) entries using the Dell UEFI tools, but after experiencing the same issue 3 months in a row and having Window reformat a USB linux backup drive I forgot to disconnect when Windows updated, I removed Windows.
Have you checked in your BIOS or UEFI settings that Windows hasn’t just placed itself at the top of the boot sequence instead of your Fedora install entry? That would be the first thing to check and is quite common that Windows likes to change this after updates.
If there’s entries for both, next step would be to plug in a Live USB with Fedora on it and boot into that. There’s a few guides online how to rebuild GRUB in a live session.
And always a good idea to install Windows and Linux on separate disks if possible.