After enabling Secure Boot because of the Battlefield 6 Beta, I decided I should switch from Pop Os to Bazzite as Pop Os doesn’t support secure boot, and I wanted to try something else anyways.
So I Installed Bazzite on the SSD Pop Os used to be installed on, a completely separate SSD from my Windows drive.
Later that day when I decided to switch back to Windows for some Battlefield 6 action, I was very surprised that the “UEFI Windows Boot Manager” boot option on my Windows SSD is completely gone. Now when I boot on my Windows SSD, it says it cannot find an OS on this drive.
So… That’s problematic. Does anyone know how I can fix this ? Thank you so much !
Have you tried manually adding a UEFI boot device to the BIOS? I have to do this sometimes with some boot media that wont aromatically add itself correct to the BIOS.
When adding, you can drill into the boot folder and there is several options you can try.
Okay I didn’t even know that was possible, could you please explain to me in a little bit more detail what that is, and what I’m supposed to be doing or looking for when adding a UEFI boot device manually ? Thanks a lot!
The efibootmgr command is available on the Bazzite host.
The worst-case scenario is that you have to download an official Windows 11 ISO, write it to a USB or DVD, and boot into the setup to repair the boot partition.
Hi, thanks for your response !
I did just create a USB Windows 11 drive, but unfortunately the "Startup Repair” isn’t working, and I’m getting really confused with all the partitions and stuff in the command line. All I can see is that my Windows drive doesn’t seem to have a “System” partition. On Bazzite’s disk manager I can see:
I have one 17 Mb unknown partition (says “Microsoft reserved”)
One 2TO NTFS partition (my data)
And one 688 Mo NTFS Recovery partition.
Seems like you are between a rock and a hard place.
If you go to youtube and search for “repairing windows ssd missing system partition”, a bunch of hopefully helpful videos show up. Here is one that caught my attention that may be helpul for you. As the video says, if at all possible, please do a backup somehow of the windows drive before working on it! You can skip the first part of the video, which goes through creating the installation media with the media creation tool. I’d suggest starting at 9:14. Good luck!
Thank you for the good luck wishes, I’ll try with this video but I have already tried with another with no luck.
I’m just baffled Bazzite took the liberty of removing my boot partition, from another completely different drive ?? How is that default behaviour ? Sorry I’m kind of spilling out my frustration here but that’s the first time I‘ve had this issue installing an OS, and looking through the internet it seems I’m not the only one experiencing this.
I have also noticed that my BIOS no longer shows my drive as UEFI bootable ? Like before it used to show some drives as both “Drivename” and “UEFI: Drivename”, but that’s no longer the case, now everything is just “Drivename”, and Bazzite doesn’t have an EFI folder in /sys/firmware, suggesting it installed in Legacy BIOS mode ? But I haven’t touched my BIOS settings before installing Bazzite, i’m so confused.
Unfortunately, I’m not knowledgeable enough to help with UEFI stuff very much, or how to get into the weeds and explain what you are seeing and how to fix it. I’ll try to explain what I did with my setup.
As I understand your setup, you have a dual boot, dual disk set up. A while back I wanted to set up my system that way as well, with Windows on the primary drive and Bluefin on the secondary. In reading how to set that configuration up, the best advice I found was to first remove the windows disk, then add the second disk and install bluefin. It seems that it is a known problem that linux installs can hose a windows disk, just as you describe. (If you’ve not been doing this with several linux installs, you were probably really lucky.)
So I did that. Getting linux installed and booting all by itself, without the windows disk. Then I added the windows disk back in and booted with no problems. The bios recognized both disks, and I was able to boot using the boot options menu (Del for my computer).
Once both systems were back up, I then installed the rEFInd boot manager through Windows, which gives a nice gui boot loader. I know that’s not a pure linux solution, but it works nicely for me.
If I have any advice for you, it would be to take out the linux disk and do whatever you need to get your windows disk back up and working.
Boot from the media creation tool and follow the the video I linked to above to see if all the partitions are there using the diskpart command. If the EFI System Partition is there, you should be able to rebuild it following the later part of the video.
It may be that you have to back up your Windows partition, completely reformat and install Windows on the disk again, and copy the backed up files you want to the new install. Hopefully you won’t have to do that.
My drive works just fine, it’s just lacking an EFI partition. The thing is I’m my BIOS is also acting suspicious, because since I installed Bazzite, I’m no longer seeing any UEFI boot options
Does the windows disk show up if you do a list disk in diskpart from the booted media creation tool? If so, what do you see if you then do a list vol after you select the disk?
