Old laptop suddenly won't recognize Linux boot drive
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!
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 ...
Make sure that Windows Fast Startup is turned off. I don't know if that's specifically the problem here, but in my experience quite a few "everything's fine, it should be working!" boot issues have been resolved by booting into Windows, turning off Fast Startup, and then doing a full shut down before going back to Linux, especially on laptops.
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.
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).
Yeah, it's most likely either this or that. That fast startup thing also prevents other NTFS disks from being reachable by Linux.
Yeah that's something I can try. I suspect that it is indeed Windows that's causing issues, but not quite sure how yet. I'll disable fast startup and see if it makes a difference
You can also try to change the boot order to make Linux drive first option in BIOS. Might help.
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...
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.
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
From the LiveUSB, make sure to check the boot record, and that Grub is there. If not, look up installing grub properly from a LiveUSB. Here's a general example, though it's using Ubuntu (shouldn't matter much) https://www.fosslinux.com/4477/how-to-repair-the-grub-bootloader-using-a-ubuntu-live-usb-drive.htm
Is the boot record stored on the drive or on the laptop? If the former, it should be okay but I'll check regardless. If the latter, maybe it got wiped by Windows?
It's in the drive.
I'm confused... Did you ever at one point have BOTH drives hooked up to this same machine? Also, you said it boots fine on a separate machine, so it should be there, no?
Nope, there is only one sata slot. It should be there, but at this point nothing surprises me anymore. I'm just as confused as you are
Are you using efi boot. You may need to remove the windows selection and point it to the Linux efi selection in the boot options.
I can't select Linux in the boot options, that's the problem
Then the boot entry is probabl messed up. You can try switching to legacy boot, instead of EFI just to see if you have luck but sounds like you will need to have a live USB stick to boot and repair your drive
The boot entry was indeed messed up! Managed to fix it from a live usb
Awesome. Yeah Windows is a Monster