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!
I’ve dealt with something similar to this on a lenovo ideapad.
The BIOS picks up UEFI info from windows and messes up the boot config and order. I solved it by using grub2 rescue, booting to the correct Linux entry and using grub to update UEFI and write the config correctly again.
Super pain in the a**.
This ended up being the issue! Booted up a live USB, mounted the disk and ran
After rebooting it worked again!
Now to never plug a windows drive into that PC again…