Surprises with Anaconda

Hello, everyone.

First of all, please excuse me if this is unclear, but my last experience with Anaconda was also unclear, and I would like to reduce my ignorance.
For reasons that are irrelevant here, I had to install Windows on my system, even though I rarely use it. I set aside a couple of hours and began the process.

Once Windows was installed and set up for dual boot, I started installing Fedora, using the simple method of installing it alongside other systems without configuring anything.

To my surprise: There was no way to boot Fedora. It was installed, but some UEFI issue was preventing it from working.

After several attempts, I decided to reinstall with manual partitioning and create a new EFI partition, and surprise, surprise: It installs fine, but it doesn’t use systemd boot, it uses grub.

I would appreciate some guidance to understand these things.

Thank you.

Can you say more about the UEFI issue here?

When you say “surprise”, do you mean that you had specified inst.sdboot in order to use systemd-boot? That unfortunately doesn’t work correctly on Fedora 43.

From what I’ve seen, the most ‘advanced’ Linux systems try to install themselves using the Windows EFI partition, but I don’t think that works (that’s what Fedora did by default, and it couldn’t boot).

Actually, I don’t remember ever telling the Fedora installer which boot I wanted.

It normally should work - it worked fine for my machine when I installed Fedora in addition to its existing Windows 10.

So what you’re seeing is unexpected, but in order to troubleshoot we need to know more about what happened when Fedora couldn’t boot.

Right, so the expected behaviour is to get GRUB, which is the standard for Fedora.

  • An option to boot under the name ‘*’ appeared in my BIOS.
  • My laptop has a key to choose the boot option, and there I saw Windows and another one for Linux.
  • If I chose the Linux option (or the * option), Windows would start up.
  • After checking the partitions, Fedora mounted /boot/efi in the Windows EFI.

That’s indeed surprising. The option should be called “Fedora”.

Some laptops do make it awkward for you to boot a non-Windows OS. However, that doesn’t seem like what’s happening here, since it booted fine when you installed into a separate EFI for Fedora.

Can you see the contents of that partition (the Windows EFI that the first Fedora install tried to use)? Is there an /EFI/fedora directory in it?