Dual boot and updating to windows 11

Hi all,

I’m considering updating the win10 on my laptop to win11. Right now it’s dual boot with endeavor as my daily driver, but I occasionally need a bare metal windows so I keep it around. The laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad carbon X1, secure boot is turned off, and using grub as the boot manager.

Just looking for local experience, what are the gotchas ect. I’m currently backing up my home drive, and I’m considering backing up an image of the partition in case thing go very wrong. I’ll probably back up all the grub stuff just for safe keeping.

Any collective wisdom?

It will do the same as any Windows feature update, i.e. wipe GRUB and/or UEFI so you’ll need to restore your boot loader.

There are other threads on the forum, e.g. Windows 11 apparently wiped EOS EFI partition

Other than that, backups are never a bad thing.

1 Like

Here are the instructions for reinstalling the bootloader:

https://discovery.endeavouros.com/system-rescue/repair-a-non-booting-grub/2021/03/

1 Like

Windows may not overwrite your EndeavourOS boot entry if it is not at top. Before upgrading, go to your UEFI menu, put Windows to the top of the boot menu so laptop directly boots to Win, perform upgrade and put EndeavourOS back to top. If Windows doesn’t decide to consume EnOS boot entry, everything should work just fine.

1 Like

Looking the the Repair a non-booting GRUB article it states to use:

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=EndeavourOS-grub

while the archwiki states to use:

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=esp --bootloader-id=GRUB

does the ID eventually refer to folder within efi/EFI which contains the grubx64.efi file?

the bootloader-id can really be just about anything. It just sets an ID (label) for that particular installation.

The esp in ArchWiki is a placeholder, indicating you should fill it as required ie. /boot/efi on Endeavour.
What you set for --bootloader-id is really up to you.

1 Like

I knew esp was a place holder, thanks for clearing up about bootloader-id

1 Like

Thanks that for clearing it up

1 Like

@mrvictory Thanks for this bit of advice! I moved the windows boot entry to the top of the boot stack and did the update to from Windows 10 → 11 without a hitch! it didn’t touch grub at all. After rebooting I moved grub back to the top and everything works!