Issue with dual boot

Hi,

I am having a dual-boot setup with Fedora 40 and Windows 11. It worked fine for many months.
Yesterday, during playing a game Windows 11 crashed and after that the Windows 11 option in the grub menu displayed some error when selected.

After booting to Fedora instead and looking at grub customizer there was no Windows option anymore. Rebooting, the grub menu does not show the Windows option now either.

I can see the Windows files in Fedora. This is what I can see when using the below commands:

fdisk -l

Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 1.86 TiB, 2048408248320 bytes, 4000797360 sectors
Disk model: XPG GAMMIX S70 BLADE                    
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: FEAC8204-E0F1-4191-85F3-7347222A2ED4

Device              Start        End    Sectors   Size Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1         34      32767      32734    16M Microsoft reserved
/dev/nvme0n1p2      32768 2048032767 2048000000 976.6G Microsoft basic data
/dev/nvme0n1p3 2048032768 3738650623 1690617856 806.1G Microsoft basic data
/dev/nvme0n1p4 3738650624 3739879423    1228800   600M EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p5 3739879424 3741976575    2097152     1G Linux extended boot
/dev/nvme0n1p6 3741976576 4000796671  258820096 123.4G Linux filesystem


Disk /dev/zram0: 8 GiB, 8589934592 bytes, 2097152 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 4096 = 4096 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/sda: 57.3 GiB, 61524148224 bytes, 120164352 sectors
Disk model:  Sandisk 3.2Gen1
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: A04BB746-71A9-4688-947B-42176EC49AF2

lsblk

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
zram0       252:0    0     8G  0 disk [SWAP]
nvme0n1     259:0    0   1.9T  0 disk 
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0    16M  0 part 
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0 976.6G  0 part 
├─nvme0n1p3 259:3    0 806.1G  0 part 
├─nvme0n1p4 259:4    0   600M  0 part /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p5 259:5    0     1G  0 part /boot
└─nvme0n1p6 259:6    0 123.4G  0 part /home
                                      /

Any help is appreciated in recovering the Windows 11 option.
Thank you.

1 Like

I edited your post to put the command output into pre-formmated text so its easier to read.
Use the </> button to do this.

Can you boot into Windows from the UEFI BIOS?
If you have not done this yet I think its a good idea to make sure windows boots and can repair the file system if needs to.

Now boot back into grub.
Can you boot windows from grub now?

You say you are using a grub-customiser, what do you mean by that?

There is a grub-customiser package that some people have used, but its not compatible with the Fedora as it uses BLS and has lead to issues for those people.

What is the output of sudo efibootmgr?

Hi,

No. I am not able to boot from BIOS either. I do not see any option for it.

This is the grub-customizer I have used.

image

Result of sudo efibootmgr:

BootCurrent: 0007
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0007,0002,000A,0001,0009
Boot0001  Hard Drive	BBS(HD,,0x0)/VenHw(5ce8128b-2cec-40f0-8372-80640e3dc858,0200)0000474f00004e4fc9000000080000008d005800500047002000470041004d004d00490058002000530037003000200042004c004100440045000000050109000200000000010416008b12e85cec2cf040837280640e3dc85802007fff040002010c00d041030a000000000101060003010101060002000101060000040101060000000317100001000000707c183420a6c0007fff040001042e00ef47642dc93ba041ac194d51d01b4ce632004e003300340032004c00410036004300470048004a0000007fff04000000424f
Boot0002* Fedora	HD(4,GPT,4840f5b1-0277-411e-86ac-2be8f2abe763,0xded74800,0x12c000)/\EFI\FEDORA\SHIMX64.EFI
Boot0007* Fedora	HD(4,GPT,4840f5b1-0277-411e-86ac-2be8f2abe763,0xded74800,0x12c000)/\EFI\FEDORA\SHIM.EFI0000424f
Boot0009  USB HDD	BBS(HD,,0x0)/VenHw(5ce8128b-2cec-40f0-8372-80640e3dc858,0900)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
Boot000A* UEFI:  USB, Partition 1	PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1,0x3)/Pci(0x0,0x0)/USB(6,0)/HD(1,GPT,02214dae-048c-4b0c-9dae-fccc6aab250a,0x800,0x72987df)0000424f

Here is a nice markdown guide

To the issue, this sounds to be like totally a Windows issue. It crashed and is not bootable anymore, classic. I dont think Fedora has anything to do with that.

Note that if you ask Windows guys to fix it for you, they will very likely remove grub in the process.

We might still be able to help, but Windows is just a pain a lot of times.

Added dual-boot, unsupported, windows

Ah got it. Thank you.

1 Like

According to that output Windows boot entries are completely missing.

I suspect you may need to reinstall Windows to setup the UEFI BIOS configuration.

OP, one thing you might want to check on before you go with this option would be to take a quick look at what’s actually in your EFI partition, just to see if something important got deleted.

To do that, boot to fedora, then sudo -i to get into a root shell and do ls -l /boot/efi/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/*.efi. Do you see the file, bootmgfw.efi, among them? If so, it may be possible to repair your system without a Windows re-install.

Why go to the trouble of figuring that out? Because Windows is notorious for being greedy with the EFI partition; it will quite possibly re-format it and delete your fedora EFI-based data when you do it. One place to start to research that latter part would be here.

Good luck!

Under /boot/efi/EFI/ there is no Microsoft folder at all. Only folders I can see are BOOT and fedora.

That’s too bad, because I suspect it’s going to be a bit more work to re-install Windows and get back to where you were with your dual-boot’d system before your, uh, incident.

Maybe this might help. Do a search with “windows restore bootloader” in Google or similar and there are quite a few articles and some videos on how to restore the bootloader. If they work, I have no idea.