Hello everyone. I am in the process of performing a manual installation of Fedora with a Dual Boot setup with Windows 11 on the same drive.
Windows 11 has already been installed. I installed to its own individual partition, leaving the majority of my drive as an empty unallocated partition to use during the fedora installation.
At the final stages of the installation, the installer notes that it will be formatting nvme0n1p1, the 210 MB EFI drive, which I understand is the windows boot loader as seen below.
This does not seem right to me. I thought this would prevent any attempts to boot into windows at all from Grub for a dual boot system.
The following is the screenshot of the installer’s storage configuration. I have not made any changes to any of the windows created partitions after installation.
When using an existing efi partition there is a problem with the displayed intent of the installer. It claims to format the existing partition but actually does not.
Note that my experience is with dual booting when I allow the installer to use the existing efi partition while you apparently are creating a second efi partition on the same drive. In that case I have no experience on whether it will actually reformat the existing windows efi partion or not.
It would be nice if we would test the version 45 of the installer so mistakes like this could be fixed before the final iso image is created. I noticed that to access the storage editor is moved out from the … menu, but you still have to look for it.
Comment 2 is the same situation as OP here - i.e. the installer said it would “format” an EFI partition from another distro, which was not going to be used by Fedora.
Seems like this would be a candidate for a F45 blocker bug, since we’ve seen that it clearly creates (understandable) worry and doubt for users doing a dual-boot install.
I tested by using the linked iso for f45 and installing on a VM that was previously running f44.
The storage editor is very much similar to the older anaconda version and allows very easy specification of actions to be performed.
The summary now explicitly shows formatting or simply mounting for each partition being managed, and when defining those partitions it has the old style toggle button to format or not for each partition.
This is a great improvement over the installer storage manager as it was for f44.
If someone has the answer to that subtopic, I’d really like it. (I think, but correct me if I’m wrong, this question is better here than a new thread).
If you give it (Fedora 44 installer) a new efi as the mount point for /boot/efi, it still says it will reformat the old efi. Is that entirely a lie (it won’t touch it) or only partially a lie (it will replace the fedora directory in the old efi)?
That would be a bit tricky and/or dangerous for me to test myself with the systems I currently have.
I would normally want to share the existing efi partition. But my most recent Fedora 44 install was a test that I wish to completely back out (with zero lasting impact on the prior Windows/Fedora dual boot).
I tried first having it decide its own partitions in the existing unpartitioned space. I hadn’t yet seen this thread, so I worried it was telling the truth about reformating efi.
So I tried manually creating partitions, including a new efi, and specifying mount points. Double failure: It still said it would reformat the old efi despite having a different /boot/efi mount point AND I couldn’t figure out how to split / and /home to subvolumes of a btrfs when manually partitioning (I more recently read another thread on that problem, not cookbook enough for me to follow, but enough I’ll likely try again at some point).
Finally, I turned off the boot flag in the old efi, then installed into the unpartitioned space (which automatically creates a new efi and correctly splits a btrfs, etc.). Then I turned the boot flag back on for the old efi, so I now can select either efi from the BIOS (again, not something I normally want, but did want this time).
Reasonable thoughts and functional, but not necessary if your only goal is to be able to wipe out the fedora installation. When sharing the efi partition fedora creates its own directory tree in that partition which users can see as /boot/efi/EFI/fedora while microsoft has a similar tree /boot/efi/EFI/Microsoft. Removing the directory /boot/efi/EFI/fedora will remove all traces of the fedora boot from that shares efi partition.
On the bare partition these directories are seen as EFI/Microsoft & EFI/fedora
Deleting all other fedora partitions would complete wiping out all traces of the fedora install.
The f44 installer lies when it says it will format an existing efi partition. It only formats a completely new efi partition. This has been fixed by the updates to the installer with the upcoming f45 release.
I thought I was pretty clear. I don’t want to wipe Fedora off the dual boot after I’m done testing the new install of Fedora. I want to wipe only the new install of Fedora, leaving the prior install of Fedora (not just the prior install of Windows) untouched.
I understood the main point of this thread: The installer reformats when using a new efi and the message that it would reformat when sharing an existing efi was false (and the false message has been fixed in a version I’m not using yet).
But that is different from the question of whether it is sharing an old efi when it is given a /boot/efi mount point for a new efi.
I think it shouldn’t share an old efi when given a different mount point OR it should refuse to accept such a mount point when it will be using the old efi despite it. But which is the bug: doing the wrong thing or (like the related, but not really the same, main bug of this thread) saying it will do the wrong thing when it won’t?
I also tested F45. Yes, it is a big improvement. But I think it is still slightly wrong in the case of having two EFI partitions.
I used manual assigning of mount points to select the second (of two) EFI partitions (and similarly the second of two /boot and btrfs for / and /home).
The list of what it would do correctly showed my selected mount points and correctly showed what would happen to each (all of which is unchanged from F44).
In F45 as in F44, the top of the list was the first EFI partition. The difference was that F45 said it would mount that partition, while F44 said it would format that partition. F45 actually did nothing to that first EFI partition and correctly installed the Fedora directory into the second EFI and correctly set up the new install to mount the second EFI.
So only having the first efi unconditionally on the top of the list is wrong.
Of course, I (and others) get paranoid when installing to share with previous versions. So anything it says it will do that is different from what it actually will do is disturbing.
(While anaconda was running, I took a screen shot of the offending UI, then mounted a partition that would not be involved in the install and saved the screen shot there. That resulted in a plausible size .bmp file, but it doesn’t contain a valid image. )
