Windows update deleted GRUB from my system.
As far as I have reviewed, there is no need to reinstall Fedora at it’s entirety.
Only GRUB.
POST is done by UEFI system.
GRUB menu isn’t shown at startup. Boots directly into Windows.
However, boot sequence in UEFI has both Fedora and Windows listed.
First option is USD so boot can be made from a live USD.
Looking into de NVME drive, the /boot folder is empty.
Both Windows and Fedora 41 are installed in two disks.
System files on an NVME drive. Data files on an SSD. So, /home is in the SSD drive.
NVME drive is partitioned as follows:
nvme0n1p1 260 M fat32 EFI System Partition
nvme0n1p2 16 M Reserved by Microsoft
nvme0n1p3 118 G ntfs Basic Data Windows SSD
nvme0n1p4 1000 M ntfs Basic Data Windows WINRE-DRV
nvme0n1p5 1 G ext4 /boot
nvme0n1p6 320 G Fedora btrfs
After looking several topics I have found some instructions to mount some partitions and then restore GRUB but haven’t fully understood how.
I would gratefully thank some guidance.
In the running system, there would be, because nvme0n1p1 would get mounted as /boot/efi.
But I guess you’re now using a Live USB to look at the disk contents? In that case, you won’t see the EFI partition mounted as /boot/efi.
If so, can you look at the contents of nvme0n1p1? I guess it would show as “260 MB volume” or something like that, but I don’t know whether Nautilus tries to be “user-friendly” by hiding EFI partitions from you.
Very likely. If during windows update the system needs to be rebooted unatended a couple of times, it would be natural to set the boot order appropriately for that.
So, if it was me, I would try to select the Fedora entry and see what happens. If this doesn’t work I would take it to the next step with the Live system.
I already fixed the booting order in UEFI.
Windows was shown as 1st priority.
Now it shows UBS, then Fedora and then Windows.
But the menu isn’t show at sartup. It goes directly to Windows.
But when when a USB stick is inserted, it is read properly.
Like Fedora or GParted.
Separate EFI System Partitions (ESPs): While not explicitly required for dual booting, having separate ESPs for each OS can simplify things and potentially prevent issues with Windows updates overwriting the Fedora bootloader
This concept has NOT been well received, but yet works quite well.
Do you mean reinstall Fedora from scratch?
I made a backup of my documents.
Only programs other than the ones included in the operating system should be installed again.
That might be the fastest way to resolve this issue.
Access Gparted via bootable media.
Use Gparted to create a new GPT partition table on the target SSD. Doing this will DELETE all data so ensure that important data is backed up!
Use Gparted to create a UEFI partition of about 93 MBs in size then format it FAT16.
Use Gpart to create a reasonably sized OS partition. Since you are only using a single disk, formatting it ext4 will be fine. Leave room to allow creation of a data partition in the future.
Use Gparted to name those partitions so that you can easily identify them during installation.
Choose “Custom” and “Standard” during the installation.
Select the target SSD.
Associate “/boot/efi” with the FAT16 partition and check reformat.
I mean, before doing anything else, just try to select the Fedora entry in the UEFI boot menu.
I don’t know if you made sure that the boot partition was actually mounted before you checked if it was actually empty. The same goes for the efi partition. When you boot the live system, there is a whole bunch of file systems you need to manually, one by one, mount in the right places.
Some utilities gets confused when it searches a disk unit for the ESP partition. Usually, when searching for the ESP partition it will just find the first one and doesn’t check if there is another one.
Some UEFI – perhaps most of them – firmware doesn’t care about the ESP flag and just boot from the partition with the specified partition UUID.
IF you follow complete and correct instructions, the UEFI system partition can be recreated and everything will be OK until another windows update trashes it.
A fresh Fedora install using a separate partition for the UEFI system partition used by Fedora will prevent windows from troubling your Fedora partition.
