[SOLVED-See Comments] My "Windows" boot entry has disappeared from the EFI menu (pawb.social)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by VinesNFluff@pawb.social to c/techsupport@lemmy.world

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Title. I dual-boot Windows and Linux. I always saw people making "WINDOWS DELETED MY LINUX BOOTLOADER OMGOMG" posts and it had never happened to me. Now, the opposite has happened. I switched from EndeavourOS to OpenSUSE and now my windows install is no longer selectable on boot.

I keep Windows in a separate drive entirely, so instead of using grub, I use the EFI's boot-select menu thingamafuck (look I don't know jargon okay?) to choose Windows when I need it.

Well today it's not there. Only the Linux entries show up. The Windows partition itself seems to be in good order, like, I can access it from within Linux no problem.

But yeah it doesn't show up on my EFI selector thingie. I imagine I could get the EFI Shell going, but I have no idea how to use THAT either.

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[-] VinesNFluff@pawb.social 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I FIXED IT

Fucking hell that was a pain. And as most of the painful things in life, it was mostly self-inflicted.

I consider it the polite thing to make a report on what I did to fix things when I solve my problem in a tech support thread (in case someone is ever searching this, to avoid the xkcd scenario ) so I will do that now:

First off, going into a Windows install media and running some commands, as described by @alphapuggle@programming.dev and @Babbiorsetto@lemmy.sdf.org did do the trick for reviving Windows.
BUT, I am an idiot and I pointed Windows to the wrong thing, so it wiped out my Linux boot partition. O o p s i e . . .
I was a bit stumped on what to do, and had actually flashed the USB drive (this idiot here only owns ONE USB drive) with the SUSE install media, fully intending to do a complete reinstall, but THEN,
I realised that in the install media's menu, there is a "boot Linux system" menu, and entered it on a whim
Sure enough, that found my existing OpenSUSE install and let me get into it.
From there I just used YaST to re-install and re-configure grub
Both Windows and Linux seem to be functioning now, yay

So, 85% "me being an idiot", but, the problem is solved. I thank everyone who made a comment.

[-] alphapuggle@programming.dev 2 points 7 months ago

Glad it's working! For the future, you might want to put ventoy on your singular USB. You can then put different ISOs on it, so you can have windows and Linux recovery on one keychain. Has saved my ass a number of times!