Update from this post from the other day: What to know before Dual Booting Windows + Linux?

TLDR: I got it working, started learning, tried to fix a grub issue and borked the whole system.

So after considering all the advice, I went and disabled/prepped/backed up, and started the process. I managed to get Fedora KDE installed on another partition and everything was looking ok. I installed some programs, started learning for a few hours, but there was one small issue. The grub configuration from the video didn’t really work. Windows wasn’t booting by default, and when I tried to do the GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true to have it boot the last OS, it also didn’t work. When booting windows, a message would flash by saying '/EFI/fedora/grubenv' not found.

Looking more into it, the video says to use sudo grub2-mkconfig -o boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg but I think the correct one now is grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg? I found this thread, but I couldn’t run the first command because it gave a conflict error, and I think there were two versions of grub2 installed?

So anyways, I tried running the setup again, thought it was ok and did a reboot to test… and got hit with a black screen with minimal BASH like line editing is supported.

At this point I’m a little worried and lost, thinking maybe I wasn’t ready to try this, and trying to get it back the way it was. I found this guide, but I get stuck trying to mount the EFI partition.

Any tips on where to go from here? Right now I plugged in the USB I used earlier, booted Fedora from it, and opened the terminal. Past that I’m a bit lost on how to fix grub.

  • ebits21English
    32·
    1 year ago

    Lesson I also learned when I started out with Linux… don’t fuck with grub unless you really understand what you’re doing! Borking grub is a right of passage imo.

    I’m not sure how to fix your issue (I gave up on dual booting and just have windows in a virtual machine, so Windows doesn’t mess up grub).

    I always keep backups of the working grub config in case I need to restore. Just boot into a version of Linux on a usb key and copy the working config.

    • Papamousse@beehaw.org
      4·
      1 year ago

      oh yes, did it multiple times… Now I’m using MX Linux, if I break something, I boot on the USB disk and click on the “repair boot”, and tada! it works again. But yeah I always keep a backup of my EFI in case of too.

      Grub is still better than LILO :)

    • OtterOPAEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I’ll have to give this another try tomorrow when I’m more awake. I probably should have just asked here when I had grub issues in the first place.

      Just boot into a version of Linux on a usb key and copy the working config.

      So I guess this is what the guides are saying, but I seem to get stuck on the installation step with this error grub2-install: error: this utility cannot be used for EFI platforms because it does not support UEFI Secure Boot. Hopefully I understand it better once i’m more awake. Thank you though!