Broken and messy dual boot setup (Cannot boot into windows and need to for work)

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

Hello. I’ve got a very messy system at this point. You can see my older posts that I’ve changed from systemdboot to grub, and have had problems with /efi before. As it stands, I’ve got endeavour installed as my main os, a fedora install on the same drive that replaced a previous different distro I tried out, and my old windows install on a separate drive along with some extra linux storage space.

This has been setup in a really messy way for quite a while and I wanted to fix that. For example there’s a ‘uefi os’ listed that boots into something messed up and somehow changes my boot order, and there’s what looks like a second listing for fedora labelled as ubuntu.

Biggest problem though and why I’ve decided now to fix this though is the windows install is borked. It bluescreens on boot and after asking around, it’s because secure boot has failed and it’ll be because of the boot changes I made. I don’t know when exactly it broke, but I did have this working before with endeavour on here at the same time.

I haven’t tried the windows recovery environment because much to my shame I’ve forgot my local password and it’s asking for it to do anything. Something I need to sort once I can at least boot, though.

Here’s what comes up with sudo parted -l and efibootmgr, let me know what else you need to see. I want to learn how this stuff works and try tweak my setup, but for now I really just need to get windows booting since I need it for upcoming work very soon :sweat_smile:

Model: ATA Samsung SSD 870 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name                          Flags
 1      1049kB  106MB   105MB   fat32        EFI system partition          boot, esp, no_automount
 2      106MB   123MB   16.8MB               Microsoft reserved partition  msftres, no_automount
 3      123MB   490GB   489GB   ntfs         Basic data partition          msftdata
 4      490GB   490GB   542MB   ntfs                                       hidden, diag, no_automount
 5      490GB   1000GB  510GB   ext4         Storage


Model: WD_BLACK SN850X 2000GB (nvme)
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 2000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name                  Flags
 1      2097kB  1051MB  1049MB  fat32        EFI System Partition  boot, esp
 2      1051MB  1001GB  1000GB  ext4         endeavouros
 3      1001GB  1002GB  1074MB  ext4
 4      1002GB  2000GB  999GB   btrfs

BootCurrent: 0003
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0003,0008,0000,0005,0001
Boot0000* ubuntu        HD(1,GPT,6c009482-5afc-4f35-bc1e-1ab79172223b,0x1000,0x1f3fff)/\EFI\VanillaOS\shimx64.efi
Boot0001* Windows Boot Manager  HD(1,GPT,f1dfc8c9-c51b-40dd-a480-0020996448e9,0x800,0x32000)/\EFI\MICROSOFT\BOOT\BOOTMGFW.EFI57494e444f5753000100000088000000780000004200430044004f0042004a004500430054003d007b00390064006500610038003600320063002d0035006300640064002d0034006500370030002d0061006300630031002d006600330032006200330034003400640034003700390035007d0000004d000100000010000000040000007fff0400
Boot0003* arch  HD(1,GPT,6c009482-5afc-4f35-bc1e-1ab79172223b,0x1000,0x1f3fff)/\EFI\arch\grubx64.efi
Boot0005* UEFI OS       HD(1,GPT,6c009482-5afc-4f35-bc1e-1ab79172223b,0x1000,0x1f3fff)/\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI0000424f
Boot0008* Fedora        HD(1,GPT,6c009482-5afc-4f35-bc1e-1ab79172223b,0x1000,0x1f3fff)/\EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi
2

have you tried booting into windows from your bios/boot menu?

That should work regardless of how fcked your linux bootloader may be, though of course ideally it should detect and boot windows as well, if you really need to get into windows asap and it ain’t working, this would be hte first workaround I’d try.

3

Yes. Booting from there, grub, or I think systemdboot that comes up with fedora all results in the same problem.

4

well, the answer depends on if you’re using grub or systemdboot, but the default for eos i think is systemdboot although u can select it when u install.

Still, you should have a common EFI partition between windows and linux, so you can check on linux if that’s the case.

ls /efi/EFI/

Should output:

BOOT  Linux  Microsoft	systemd

You may have to run the command as root.

5

I installed it with systemdboot, and then later with the help of this lovely forum manually changed it to grub.

Here’s the results of that command. Definitely not as it should be. VanillaOS is what I had before replacing it with fedora. At least I’m pretty sure it replaced it…

arch  BOOT  fedora  VanillaOS
6

Oh wait you have it on 2 separate drives…

Oh your probelm is that windows install bluecscreens, geez sorry i didn’t read properly.

This is basically a windows problem, so you’re going to need to solve it with windows solutions, when I encounter situations like this the first thing I generally try on windows is their startup recovery thingy, have you tried that?

1 Like
7

Like I said, got locked out of it :pensive:
I’m 90% sure from asking around and the circumstance that it’s because of my boot situation and was hoping there was something I could do to sort it from the outside since it was messing with this stuff that broke it in the first place.

8

You’re never locked out of startup recovery on windows. and you can also always access it through a windows installation usb too in the unlikely event that you truly are.

See here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-recovery-environment-0eb14733-6301-41cb-8d26-06a12b42770b

I think the way I used to access it was spam F11 or F9 or something like that on bootup (when you see the spinning loading thingy i think, or possibly in the window between that and the startup screen)

9

Locked out as in all of the recovery and reset options are asking for a password to use. Even accessing the command prompt. I think you can do more to reset the local admin password from a locked out screen than a recovery screen, so I was hoping to get it booting first if I could.

10

Sounds like bitlocker, either you can get that password or all your data on that particular windows installation is gone and you haev to just set it up again. You should be able to get it through your microsoft account somehow, normally.

Microsoft has been screwing a lot of people over lately with bitlocker.

11

I can still access all my files on there from linux, is the thing. No problems dragging stuff over and the like. I’d buy a drive to dump it all onto and reset it if I didn’t know that means installing a newer windows that will be awful about disabling some of the stuff I was able to.

Also, I remembered something I was recommended to try! When asking the more windows folks (pretty rude and so left me hanging with this as a ‘go figure it out’), they said I could reset the uefi keys if that was an option. This is something I have no idea how to do or what it really means.