Brief overview, I just downloaded Windows 11 on my second drive yesterday. I had Fedora on my other drive and I had been using it for about a year. After installing Windows, enabling secure boots, csm etc. I was no longer able to access Fedora. I had backed up most of my important stuff on separate drive in-case this would happen. So I though this would be great time install Bazzite on the main drive, and I did, I installed it with help from video called “How to Dual-Boot Windows 11 and Bazzite with the new live ISO” from Mike’s Tech.
Obviously I skipped shrinking Windows step, installed Bazzite, I added encryption to my drive, installation went smoothly and without hickups, did the Enroll MOK step, and now Bazzite is up and running.
So that’s the context, now to the issues.
First, my Windows boot is now completely gone, in Bios and Boot menu, it can no longer detect Windows. (I suspect this has something to do with Windows installing something to the drive I wiped and installed Bazzite on, I believe I saw EFI System Health in the partition that’s now Bazzite.)
Second, everytime I open up Bazzite now it requires me to input passphrase first before getting to log-in screen. I’d prefer if I just could get to either log-in screen, or straight to desktop as this is stationary computer in my house.
I just had to come in here because I feel so defeated after installing Windows for nearly 4-5 hours, debloating it… It was such a hassle and I really don’t want to go through with it again…
This is normal. When you have encryption, you have one password to unlock the encryption and a separate password for your account. You could set autologin for your user account and then you would only have the encryption password.
The settings for that are pretty well hidden. In KDE Plasma 6.5 they are in System Settings->Colors & Themes->Login Screen->Behavior
Ok, sweet. I applied encryption thinking that it would’ve deterred Windows from taking over the OS this time around. Turns out I just aggrovated it.
But at the very least with this I get to log in more simply.
I do wonder if I should reinstall Bazzite while possible without it, but do you think if I find away to restore Windows that it could cause it trouble not having the drive encrypted, or if I have to re-install Windows (which I’m not looking forward to after last night).
I think your Windows issues are unrelated to encryption.
It is hard to say without more information but my best guess is that you has both OSes sharing the same EFI partition and then you erased it when you installed Bazzite.
After some time pondering my options, I decided to check if there were any tutorials on recovering the deceased boot partition, and sure enough, I found this video. https://youtu.be/Mzloza_2g_c?si=wkEl_qo3DXR7BvLp
I am so freaking relieved, all that stress is finally subsiding. I don’t know why Windows forced itself on my other drive, but I finally have both Bazzite and Windows now operational. Now to hope they’ll remain in harmony.
Thank you once more for the log in suggestion, really appreciate it.
So here is a tip from docs in case you need to reinstall stuff at a later point in time: If you install Windows second, you should disconnect the Bazzite drive to prevent the Windows installer from using its EFI partition.
You can do that through bios without actually having to physically disconnect the drive.
If you plan to use the grub menu instead of bios to choose which os to load, to access windows you may need to unhide the grub menu using a ujust command on the terminal in Bazzite
“ujust configure-grub”
You may also need to disable Bitlocker in windows, otherwise it might not show in grub.
To prevent other issues from happening later it is also advisable to go into disk management and disable indexing of the drive and write-caching of the drive. After which you may choose to disable the drive (you can also try uninstalling the drive, however it may be automatically reinstalled by windows later, not sure). This is to make sure windows is not trying to manage that disk: like loading new drivers, doing stuff with bitlocker (if enabled), and automatically enabling write-caching; which in case of a crash in windows…may affect your Bazzite installation as well.
All of those things may affect the long term stability of your installation. As the saying goes “good fences make good neighbors”
