Is there a way to prevent windows update to mess with teh esp?

Ask Fedora
1

Hi guys,

After running fedora for nearly a year on my own rig at work nearly flawlessly, I decided to install it also on my main rig at home, dual booting it with win10.

for a few months everything was fine, but I ended up buying a game that needed windows, or at least if I didn’t want to mess with bottles, wine and all that jazz as this is not a very popular game. I booted windows… and I know that you know what happened : windows updated, and it messed my fedora install. When trying to boot fedora (the grub menu did appear as usual), I end up with a message that tells me

Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked.

Press enter to continue

Well, I’m no full stranger of linux, having messed with it 20 years ago, I know that windows update often mess with it… however, after searching here, finding advice from other threads, however the fedora liveusb IMO suck for recovery purposes, at least it seems like it, but chances are I’m just not aware of the new ways to do things, plus everything I forgot.

Anyhow, I decided to just reinstall fedora and remove grub, and rather rely on the bios boot options. A user seemed to say that it prevented the mess windows update tend to do on a regular basis to linux installs.

Before trying to remove grub, I though that might be a good idea to install nvidia drivers first. But akmods do rely on grubby !

All of this context and half venting for the following question : is it possible to have nvidia drivers installed and remove grub to just rely on the bios boot options instead ?
If yes, how ?

Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

2

In my expecience Windows updates usually does not mess up my dual boot with Windows 11.
I have not done the 24H2 update yet so may be surprised…

It may be as simple as changing the default boot option the BIOS to be Fedora again, assuming WIndows forced it to Windows.

What are you using in place of grub to boot Fedora?
Why do you want to get rid of grub? As you noted its expected to be the boot strap.

3

At this point you are past depending on ESP. It is usually some problem with a file system or the contents if the initrd file.

Removing grub won’t fix this, as the alternative to use systemd-boot would run into the same problem.

4

It is my understanding that windows 11 updates to 24H2 will automatically enable bitlocker with a resultant inability to dual boot until bitlocker is again disabled. supposedly that occurred about the October-November time frame.

5

I tried at some point using the live usb to chroot the root partition and try to reinstall grub, because it was suggested, even though grub seemed to work as usual. But I kept facing road blocks after roadblocks, a very frustrating experience.

Thing is, I still don’t know what windows did, my only guess is that it did something to the /boot/efi partition…

Frustrated, I just reinstalled, just to boot back into windows, that… updated, again, and messed in the exact same way, again, the very same day :rofl:

That was like 1 or 2 weeks ago, I resinstalled today, fortunately I remembered to make a dedicated /home partition from the first time, so… nothing really lost.

I didn’t check the initrd, I’ll keep that in mind next time.

I saw someone suggesting that using a dedicated boot manager should prevent that sort of things, I don’t really know why, but that’s the first thing I installed today, rEFInd to be exact.

Hopefuly, hopefully, by the time windows 10 reaches EOL, I’ll have identified only anecdotal needs for windows that a vm can handle. That would be ideal, fingers crossed.

I’m talking and not saying a thing… what do you suspect has happened ? how could I check if something is wrong with the intrd file ?

6

Then it would be useful to show us what is actually in /boot/efi by running

sudo find /boot/efi

and copy-paste the result on the next post.

Also run

efibootmgr

and show the result.

If you boot a live system you should locate the ESP partition by for example running lsblk -fp and then mount it on /mnt

sudo mount /dev/xxx /mnt

where /dev/xxx is the device name found above.
Then run

sudo find /mnt/EFI
7

You should still be able to select the Windows system from the UEFI boot menu. To me it seems that should be the preferred way to multiboot as long as the UEFI system does have a halfway decent boot menu implemented.

8

@vekruse well, I already reinstalled, so I can’t do that, that would be pointless now.
I’m taking notes however

9

The roll out from Microsoft is planned to happen over 18 months.
For example my main dual boot has not bern offered the 24H2 yet.
I keep hearing that forcing bitlocker may not happen, but the docs I could find are far from clear.

My windows 11 VM did not have bit locker turned on when it was updated.

10

I know the EFI BIOS has a key to get to the boot list of devices to boot their default OS.

But not the list of entries in the EFI BIOS boot list.

11

@vekruse Sorry, an update occured on my network shutting it down for a little while. thank you for the tracks, I’ll take time to study a bit healthy reports, it may turn out useful later on. What would you have paid attention to from that partition ? the presence of certain files ? Which ones in particular ?