Windows drive not bootable anymore after installing Fedora on seperate drive

Ask Fedora
1

I’m very confused by this, for awhile now I’ve had two ssds one with fedora and one with windows and had no issue selecting either drive to boot from in the bios. I ran out of space on my linux ssd and decided to upgrade to an m.2 drive. I then proceeded to install Fedora 41. In all of this restarting multiple times, accessing the bios, making sure correct hard drive is selected to boot from I saw the windows drive every time in the boot options. The next morning however the windows drive just straight up disappeared, I assumed I nicked a cable and swapped the ssds cables which got it to finally appear but I still can’t boot the drive. I can see it from fedora and in the bios hardware listings, I can mount and view the files but its just not bootable. I tried a windows repair disc but that failed to find windows at all on my pc so now I’m stuck.

Here’s an output of lsblk:

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda           8:0    0 931.5G  0 disk 
├─sda1        8:1    0    50M  0 part 
├─sda2        8:2    0   931G  0 part 
└─sda3        8:3    0   499M  0 part 
zram0       252:0    0     8G  0 disk [SWAP]
nvme0n1     259:0    0   1.8T  0 disk 
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0     1M  0 part 
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0     1G  0 part /boot
└─nvme0n1p3 259:3    0   1.8T  0 part /home
                                      /

Here’s an output of blkid

/dev/nvme0n1p3: LABEL="fedora" UUID="89f29ffe-8da5-41d7-bb60-da7373df4dc3" UUID_SUB="a238203f-9ee0-4408-a491-16f87a2a53ee" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="btrfs" PARTUUID="9c4f9ed4-eb35-4266-9340-056b0231f5bc"
/dev/nvme0n1p1: PARTUUID="68ab8c7f-4282-4c6e-ae49-535712d79b22"
/dev/nvme0n1p2: UUID="10bff18c-f282-4ff2-9f60-f9ead0733022" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="1154027e-3852-4d35-b210-7b0033587b9f"
/dev/sda2: BLOCK_SIZE="512" UUID="2CC035C4C03594D4" TYPE="ntfs" PARTUUID="faee5c54-02"
/dev/sda3: BLOCK_SIZE="512" UUID="28C2C4B6C2C48A10" TYPE="ntfs" PARTUUID="faee5c54-03"
/dev/sda1: LABEL="System Reserved" BLOCK_SIZE="512" UUID="D606344B06342EBD" TYPE="ntfs" PARTUUID="faee5c54-01"
/dev/zram0: LABEL="zram0" UUID="94e04d58-db24-417d-909f-b3281bac404f" TYPE="swap"

Any idea where to go from here?

2

You are asking about repair of windows booting, which is not directly a fedora topic.

However, if you remove the fedora drive and windows still will not boot then you should do the windows repair that way before reconnecting the fedora drive.

3

Once you have windows booting properly and the fedora drive is reconnected you should be able to boot windows from the grub boot menu.

That should become possible after booting fedora then run
sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

I am assuming that you are booting one of the normal versions such as Workstation or KDE or similar. The same might not work if you are using one of the atomic versions.

Once windows is bootable from the grub boot menu then you would no longer need to use bios to select the OS to boot.

4

Thank you, startup repair didn’t do anything but for some reason it booted without the linux drive then continued to boot with it back in. And yes it is KDE edition

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