I’m in a really weird situation, yesterday I installed Linux (Fedora Kinoite) on my mothers laptop (An old Asus F550C) and it worked perfectly fine. Great! Or so I thought.
We needed a few files from Windows 10, so I put that drive in, put the files on a USB stick, put the Linux drive back in and… Nothing? It recognizes the drive, but not the Linux boot option. I put the drive in my pc and it works fine, the boot drive is also still detected in the laptop just fine.
What the hell could it be??
- The laptop is fine (Windows drive works perfectly)
- The drive is recognized in bios (But not the boot option)
- The drive works fine in my desktop and can boot to Fedora
- The laptop can boot to the USB drive I used to create the install
- Yesterday it worked just fine
- I went through the bios, but can’t find any settings related to this (Secure boot did not fix it)
Update: the issue is solved! Windows somehow wiped the efiboot entry.
I mounted the drive from a live usb and ran
sudo efibootmgr --create --disk /dev/sda --part 1 --label “Fedora” --loader ‘\EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi’
After rebooting, the system works again!
From the LiveUSB, make sure to check the boot record, and that Grub is there. If not, look up installing grub properly from a LiveUSB. Here’s a general example, though it’s using Ubuntu (shouldn’t matter much) https://www.fosslinux.com/4477/how-to-repair-the-grub-bootloader-using-a-ubuntu-live-usb-drive.htm
Is the boot record stored on the drive or on the laptop? If the former, it should be okay but I’ll check regardless. If the latter, maybe it got wiped by Windows?
It’s in the drive.
I’m confused… Did you ever at one point have BOTH drives hooked up to this same machine? Also, you said it boots fine on a separate machine, so it should be there, no?
Nope, there is only one sata slot. It should be there, but at this point nothing surprises me anymore. I’m just as confused as you are