Can someone please help a stupid old man who used to love playing old games on his linux system using emulators. Can I also ask if you do help me can you please explain things to me like I am a complete idiot who knows nothing and needs very specific instructions on how to do things.
I am running fedora off of an old MSI A68HM-E33 V2 motherboard (fastboot is disabled) and an old sata 1tb hard drive. I also have a 512gb sata ssd hard drive that I wanted to install windows 10 on so I would be able to play steam and gog games on the same computer. I even thought I had the great idea of disconnecting the 1tb sata linux drive while I installed windows 10 to the ssd, thinking that windows 10 couldn’t mess up my linux drive if it wasn’t connected right? Well to my surprise when I plugged my linux drive back in after installing windows 10 the windows boot loader had attached itself to my 1tb linux drive and would not allow me to boot linux anymore. I am stuck with a bare bones windows 10 installation and all my linux stuff that I loved is now gone to me. I mean I can still see my home directory if I boot off of a usb, but that’s about it.
Please believe me when I say I didn’t want to start a thread to solve this problem, but every search I try just seems to lead me down another never ending rabbit hole of solutions that don’t seem to solve my problems. I either don’t understand what the people are saying or the commands I try to type in just don’t seem to work the way they did for the person who posted them.
I even tried to reinstall fedora 41 but I can’t even seem to get that started because it says I don’t have enough space to install it. At this point I’m about ready to just by another hard drive and start over clean with a new version of fedora 41. This really scares me though because before I installed windows 10 on that ssd, I had installed fedora 41 on it and I was trying to install fs-uae-launcher (amiga emulator) and I couldn’t do it. This is after I had installed it with no problem on fedora 38 which used to be on the 1tb sata drive. So I ended up updating to fedora 41 on the 1tb drive. I guess the syntax had changed from version 38 to 41 for getting those repositories and I was having no luck. That’s when I decided to put windows 10 on the ssd to expand my computers capabilities and I think I made a huge mistake as I have another computer that has all my windows 10 stuff on it already.
Is there any easy way to be able boot my linux drive again. I can see it has two very small partitions on it and one large almost 1tb partition, but I am completely clueless as to what I have to do. On a side not I just bought a new laptop with windows 11 on a 1tb drive and I was able to shrink the drive, install fedora 41 on the new partition and have both windows 11 and fedora 41 boot up just fine and not lose anything from the windows 11 system, not that there was anything there yet anyway, but I thought installing windows 10 and fedora 41 on two different hard drives on a desktop would be a piece of cake… I am such an idiot.
Anyway if you made it through all my ramblings, thank you and I would deeply appreciate any help anyone can give me.
I’ve had limited success with playing gog and steam games with linux, but I don’t think I have tried Lutris. I just thought since I had the spare hard drive I could switch back and forth between the 2 os’s easily, but that is not playing out so well. I just would really like to be able to boot my many years old linux os to get my stuff back, if that means never having windows on that machine then so be it. I have no real love for windoze.
Boot up the live Fedora USB and from a terminal running lsblk -f.
Please post the output here as pre-formatted text, the </> button.
With that disk information we can start diagnosing what has happened to your system.
Did you try going into the BIOS and checking on the boot options?
There should be a fedora option, but it may not be the first option after you installed Windows 10. If you reorder so that fedora is first you should be able to boot up and see the grub menu and get Fedora booted.
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When I went into my bios it said windows boot loader before my sdd drive (which is the windows drive) and the 1tb non ssd drive(the linux drive) said windows boot loader before it as well. It no longer says that now for some reason. I also had listings for both drives without any boot loader stuff in front of it, but any mention of fedora in my bios was gone. My bios lets me view the drives in UEFI mode or UEFI + legacy mode. When ever I try to boot from the drive that has linux on it I just get a flashing cursor at the top left of the screen and nothing seems happen. I’ve tried moving the linux drive to the first priority and I’ve tried selecting it from the boot loader menu F11 on my motherboard and I just get the flashing cursor and I’ve tried it in UEFI mode and UEFI + legacy mode and I get the same result. I’m glad I can at least boot off the usb and see my home directory, but my linux skills are a little lacking in how to get things back. Anyway here is my output from lsblk -f…
The sda drive is my linux drive and the sdb is the windows and the sdc is the linux usb, but I’m pretty sure you probably already know that from the output.
I tried reinstalling but I can’t seem to make that little icon that tells you where things are going to be installed happy. The icon right before you push the begin installation button. It lists that there is 1.7 gb of free space on that drive and the sda2 partition is the only one I am able to change the size of. I tried resizing it and deleting it, but nothing seems to happen. It tells me that my actions are pending and I’m not sure how to get them to happen, am I just supposed to hit the done button? Because everytime I click done I go back to the begin installation screen I still have an exclamation point next to my install location with an error.
Thanks for responding, I am willing to try anything to get my linux back. I hope I gave you enough information, let me know if you need anything else.
I am not sure how to mount /dev/sda1. When I type that exact command in terminal I get that it can’t find in /etc/fstab. But all this is unfamiliar territory to me so I’m not sure what to do. When I look in the files app I have three choices in the bottom of the left pane. I have a 1.1gb volume (which is my linux) when I double click it, it mounts /dev/sda2. There is a 511gb volume under that (which is my windows) and I am afraid to touch that one. And then under that I have fedora_localhost-live which has my root and home directory and when I look in that directory it has all my old files which I would really love to have back.
Nothing in my bios says fedora anymore. When my bios is in UEFI only mode and I go into UEFI hard disk drive bbs priorities, I have two choices windows boot manager and windows boot manager with my sata 1tb drive after it in parenthesis. If I go into UEFI+Legacy mode in my bios, I now have a hard disk drive priorities menu and a UEFI hard drives menu which looks the same. The hard disk drives priority menu has just sata3 with the 1tb drive after it and sata4 with the ssd drive after it. But no mention of fedora anywhere. Any attempt I make at trying to boot off my sata3 1tb drive results in a flashing cursor in the top left of my screen.
Is there a way to mount /dev/sda1 in terminal and what would specifically be my next step after doing that?
Thank you very much for giving me that command line. I tried looking at the man pages for mount and there are 2489 lines of help for the mount command. On line 365 there is a command that is similar to what you gave me, but I am not sure I would be able to pick up on that on my own and then be able to type it out correctly in terminal. I’m sorry, but I’m not that young anymore and my brain has a lot of stuff floating around in it and trying to read over 2000 lines of information most of which isn’t related to what I’m trying to do is not something I want to spend my time doing. I think it may be quicker for me to just drive to a store and buy another $30 hard drive and start over. I just want to enjoy using linux like I used to and I have little interest in becoming a master of all things linux from the ground up. Please don’t think I am trying to be rude or disrespectful to you, I really do appreciate you and Mat for responding to me because it is the only help I have gotten so far.
As for the command you gave me it worked great. Here is the directory listing for /dev/sda1
One way you could tackle this (hope it helps and doesn’t add confusion):
In Windows, download the live USB version of rEFInd.
The download gives you a zip file - unzip it, extract the .img file and flash it to a USB using an appropriate tool (Fedora Media Writer, Balena Etcher etc).
Reboot with that USB drive plugged in. Go into the BIOS, and you should see the USB as a bootable device. Boot from it, and you should see a screen like the one shown here with the available OSes.
Hopefully your Fedora install is shown on that screen and you can boot into it.
(Ideally, the next step would then be to fix up the bootloader from within Fedora, so that you don’t need to use your rEFInd USB on every boot.)
Thank you very much P G, I am typing this in from my original linux system and I can’t tell you how happy I am even if I had to boot from a usb drive. Now I was hoping to try to fix up the bootloader from within fedora by just typing that into google. However there seem to be a few different instructions on how to do this. I tried the easiest looking one first, it’s a youtube video by Rui Wang that basically had me do this.
[loki@fedora boot]$ sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found Windows Boot Manager on /dev/sda1@/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
Found Windows Boot Manager on /dev/sdb1@/efi/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
Adding boot menu entry for UEFI Firmware Settings ...
done
[loki@fedora boot]$ sudo os-prober
/dev/sda1@/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi:Windows Boot Manager:Windows:efi
/dev/sdb1@/efi/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi:Windows Boot Manager:Windows1:efi
Again I’m not a linux expert, but that sda1 drive (which is my fedora drive) with the words windows boot manager after it does not instill me with a lot of confidence that if I pull my usb drive out and restart I will be able to boot into my old fedora again.
I’m also not sure. It seems a bit strange that the first command said “adding boot menu entry for UEFI Firmware Settings” but not for Fedora.
Let’s see if we can check.. Basically we want to see two things:
That Fedora has written EFI files to the EFI partition. In the terminal, can you enter the command sudo ls /boot/efi/EFI ? This should show a “fedora” subdirectory (as well as “Boot” and “Microsoft”)
That the Fedora entry is in the NVRAM (i.e. the list of boot options that the UEFI knows about and offers you at bootup). In the terminal, enter the command efibootmgr. The output should show you the current list of NVRAM entries. Is Fedora one of them?
If you see Fedora in both of those outputs, then your system should be properly bootable again (although on the next startup you might need to go into BIOS and set the boot order to make Fedora default).
If not, then there’s more work to do, but for now you at least have the rEFInd USB as a way in. (I keep a rEFInd USB to hand in case Windows ever messes with my boot setup.)
That should add an NVRAM entry for the file in /dev/sda1 that kicks off Fedora’s booting - and in fact it should also make it the default boot option.
Before doing so, do sudo ls /boot/efi/EFI/Fedora to check that the shim.efi file exists. There are a few .efi files in that directory, but this should be the most “compatible” one to choose. It supports Secure Boot, but also works fine with SB turned off.
You ROCK P G! I am a very happy man. I just booted into fedora, shut down, booted into windows, shut down, and then booted back up into fedora. All with no usb inserted into my pc. So I think you solved my problem, thank you very very much! You are the best!
I installed it back in fedora 38 with dnf on this machine. This was after trying to install it through the gnome software app which back then only installed fs-uae without the launcher which seems kind of useless to me. I ended up installing both with dnf and had to run it through terminal but that was no big deal as long as it worked. I only upgraded to 41 because I was using librewolf and it started to lock up my system like I’ve never seen before. I thought upgrading the os might fix it but it locked up 41 just as bad. So sadly I had to switch back to firefox. Oddly enough, it still seems to work fine on my other windows 10 machine and also on my raspberry pi 5 running the raspberry pi os. When I tried installing fs-uae in 41 through gnome it gives me an icon for the launcher, but it doesn’t run when I click it, but I can still run it through terminal. I think the -config-manager options syntax has changed in 41 and looking at the man pages for dnf was making my head hurt so I gave up. I’m not looking for solutions to either of these problems I’m just providing some back story of how I got here.
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