Two Fedoras, one hard drive, zero GRUB menus

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1

Hello!

I had Fedora 41 Cinnamon installed on my hard drive, and I decided to install Fedora KDE alongside it (dual boot). So I created some space and installed it. Everything worked, except that I don’t have a GRUB menu anymore. It automatically runs the new KDE installation. Not even the kernel version selection that I had when only the first installation was there.

I’d like to restore the GRUB menu but I’m not sure how.

Each installation has an encrypted root partition and an unencrypted /boot partition, plus there is one EFI partition. When I ran sudo grub2-mkconfig it printed something identical to my /boot/grub2/grub.cfg, which did not include options for which OS to run. Specifically the os-prober section was empty.

So I ran sudo os-prober and got nothing.

Can someone advise?

$ sudo fdisk -l
Device              Start        End    Sectors  Size Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1       2048    1230847    1228800  600M EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p2    1230848    3327999    2097152    1G Linux extended boot
/dev/nvme0n1p3    3328000 2868643839 2865315840  1.3T Linux root (x86-64)
/dev/nvme0n1p4 2868643840 2870740991    2097152    1G Linux extended boot
/dev/nvme0n1p5 2870740992 3906734079 1035993088  494G Linux root (x86-64)

$ lsblk
NAME                                          MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINTS
zram0                                         252:0    0    8G  0 disk  [SWAP]
nvme0n1                                       259:0    0  1.8T  0 disk  
├─nvme0n1p1                                   259:1    0  600M  0 part  /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2                                   259:2    0    1G  0 part  
├─nvme0n1p3                                   259:3    0  1.3T  0 part  
├─nvme0n1p4                                   259:4    0    1G  0 part  /boot
└─nvme0n1p5                                   259:5    0  494G  0 part  
  └─luks-XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX 253:0    0  494G  0 crypt /
2

Maybe give the bootrepair USB a try. I just used it myself to fix a dual drive dual boot computer and it worked great.

1 Like
3

Here is a good read on it:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

4

Fedora with a single efi partition is unable to boot more than one OS.
This is directly related to the fact that the /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg is a pointer to the /boot/grub2/grub.cfg on the /boot partition for that particular OS.

When booting more than one fedora OS (in your case cinnamon and kde) you would need separate efi partitions for each.

os-prober sees other fedora partitions as fedora and not another OS to be added to grub.

By default the grub menu is hidden (at least on workstation and kde) which explains not seeing the grub menu.
That can be changed with sudo grub2-editenv - unset menu_auto_hide

2 Likes
5

Thank you @computersavvy for the clarification. That helps!
I’ll try reinstalling with a separate EFI partition.