Okay so i’ve been trying to install windows to dual boot alongside fedora kde since my friends are complaining that i cant play some of the games that they want me to. The issue is that windows is being insanely annoying and refusing to boot properly. Tried using balena but thats not meant to flash windows iso’s so switched to ventoy, did stuff, figured out it was set to mbr instead of gpt which doesnt work, changed it, redownloaded the windows installer directly into the usb, booted it, and it still doesnt work. Tried practically everything me and my more knowledgeable friend could think of, and it still doesnt work. Please let me know of any suggestions that i might not have attempted.
The usual path is first install Windows then add Fedora.
This works most (all) of the time.
But I have heard that adding Windows to a system with Fedora does not always work.
If you can consider running Windows in a VM. I use a Windows VM to allow me to do builds of my open source projects on Windows.
Install woeusb and do sudo woeusb --device /path/to/windows.iso /dev/sdX --target-filesystem NTFS where sdX should be your usb stick find X with lsblk
If you are installing windows AFTER fedora is already installed, the suggestion of using a VM is quite simple.
If installing to a drive and not into a VM then it is very strongly suggested that you use 2 drives, one for fedora and the other for windows so that the windows installation does not bork the fedora system. Install windows on the dedicated drive used for it then ensure that the bios boot menu can properly boot the windows OS.
The last step for dual booting is that after you have windows capable of booting, again use the bios boot menu to boot fedora and within fedora run sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg which should enable grub to boot the windows install as well as fedora.
Dual booting this way with windows 11 requires that the system boot using uefi and gpt file systems for both OSes. (win11 is uefi only for booting)
Balena Etcher will definitely not work. You generally should use the official Media Creation Tool for reliable results. Ideally create it on a spare Windows system, or maybe ask your friend to prepare the USB for you.
I would also try this - supposedly this is the way on Linux, but I don’t have experience with this myself.