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!

  • muhyb@programming.dev
    5·
    18 hours ago

    I feel like this is somehow related to Windows 10 not being really shut down when you shutdown. Try restarting Windows, and while before it gets pass BIOS, interrupt and shut down there. Then replace the drives and try to boot Linux again.

    • Redkey@programming.dev
      4·
      17 hours ago

      This is another good point. I’d try turning off Fast Startup first, and if that alone doesn’t clear the issue, try this (leaving Fast Startup off).