Is it possible to install Fedora Workstation without installing grub or a boot manager? I would like to keep windows 11 as untouched as possible and only use the F12 shortcut or get windows boot manager to recognize Fedora. I am actually trying to install Fedora 40 but this photo looks mostly the same. I went into the “Full disk summary and boot loader…” and found an option to remove the /boot/efi but it would still make 2 partions, an ext4 partition for /boot and a btrfs partition for / Do you think I would still be able to boot into it without having the bootloader and is it for sure not going to mess with windows at all? I would hate to screw up this pc just because I was tampering with a test os.
Welcome to fedora @brad1537
Do it in a virtual machine. If you dislike just delete and everything is as before. Or just use the live USB to see if you are happy what you see. No need to make dual-boot just to test. Live USB also not touches your system as long you are not playing around with the installation.
What an old screenshot!
The newes version you find on getfedora.org
I found this option on Windows 11 24H2 and didn’t remember seeing it before. Maybe it was there for a long time already?
(The Fedora 23 screenshot looks the same as the 40, with a different title bar.)
You can do what you want.
What you are describing is using the BIOS to choose what to boot.
A fedora install must have a boot manager installed that the BIOS can use to boot fedora. The windows boot manager only knows how to boot windows.
But this does not touch the windows boot manager.
Definitely been there, I’d say at least since Vista (it’s one of the first few places I go on fresh Windows installs; I think XP or ME/older had slightly different settings)
My set-ups include disabling everything there
Afaik there needs to be a bootloader in order to have the .efi file for the BIOS/etc to see and boot. I’ve heard of not having a bootloader and using the UEFI to direct-boot kernel images, but I’m thinking that’s only to the UEFI/firmware and not attachable to Windows Boot Loader.
I think /boot/efi on Linux only has the GRUB efi, so if that’s the case then tossing that EFI onto Windows’s EFI partition might work (Windows can boot GRUB that should then boot Fedora).
I prefer having separate physical disks for multiboot; both wiped clean, Windows installed first, Windows drive removed, then Linux on the 2nd drive, and I let it have primary boot with GRUB that then lets me choose either Linux or Windows. Both drives/OSs have their own EFI partitions.
In that case it must be an UKI-image, that is, an .efi file containing the kernel, the initrd and the command line parameters in one .efi file. That image will not be signed by a certificate recognized by UEFI secure boot, so you won’t be able to boot that either.
A few years ago I had installed a Linux os, I think it was Ubuntu, dual booting it with windows 10 on an old laptop. I played around with the os until I broke a few things, then in order to remove Ubuntu, I just deleted the partitions entirely. After that Windows no longer booted. I suspected that some of the stuff Windows needed to boot were overwritten in the installation, and when I deleted the partitions it could no longer find some necessary files? I don’t know much about this stuff, I was just wondering what actually happened and how to keep it from happening again.
Normally this playing around is called “learning by doing”. This is no bad as long as you make your selves some notes so that you have them on hand when you do it again.
Here an other way how you can have windows and Linux side by side without messing around with your boot partition from the main computer.
This way you can use Fedora and Windows on the same time and when you really want to move permanently, you just remove windows an install you Linux as you learned in a virtual machine.
In first place we do help here to keep Fedora Linux running. There are users where like also to help with some window issues, but main focus is Linux!