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Old laptop suddenly won't recognize Linux boot drive (feddit.nl)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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!

all 8 comments

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[–] 6 points 1 year ago

Mmmmh, that is strange, my first thought was that Windows messed with / updated the BIOS but since you checked that I'm not sure what else it could be ...

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    [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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    • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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**.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 1 year ago

    This ended up being the issue! Booted up a live USB, mounted the disk and ran

    sudo efibootmgr --create --disk /dev/sda --part 1 --label "Fedora" --loader '\EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi'

    After rebooting it worked again!

    Now to never plug a windows drive into that PC again...

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    • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Not impossible you just killed your drive somehow, though unlikely.

    Does the laptop have a manual boot menu you can try and select the drive to boot from?

    If it still boots off the LiveUSB, plug that in and see if you can view the filesystem of the drive having issues. Double check in a disk manager that it says it's bootable, then reboot, go to the LiveUSB Grub menu, and see if there is an option to skip booting the LiveUSB and boot from disk. See if anything happens then. It's only two levels of debugging, but one or the other is going to show if your drive is not cooperating.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    The drive is fine, as I can boot from it from my desktop. I'm gonna try booting from a liveusb, maybe it can tell me more

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