EDIT: So after all that, I was able to reinstall windows and download Macrium reflect + my backup. First time I tried to recover it, it failed for some reason, but the second time around I was able to restore it successfully. I’m now back where I started, thank you everyone!

I’m not done with Linux yet, but I think I’m going to try and run it in a good VM for the time being. When I’m done with classes, or when I get a separate device, I will give it another go.

Post 1: https://lemmy.ca/post/3709382

Post 2: https://lemmy.ca/post/3863438

Yesterday I could at least change the order in the BIOS to boot windows. Now I can’t even do that.

I think when reinstalling, I must have overwritten something (the EFI?). I saw some other people that had a very similar experience, and the advice was to reinstall Windows. I’m currently downloading Windows installation media on another computer and I’m going to try and reinstall windows now.

This just keeps getting worse and worse, and thank you for the help while I struggle through this.

If anyone has other tips, I’d appreciate it :)

  • Jajcus
    9•1 year ago

    On EFI systems all bootloaders are supposed to reside on a single partition. EFI does not support multiple ‘EFI system partitions’, so operating systems have to share a single one. And this is usually not a problem if it is the one Windows choose. The problem most often is broken EFI firmware which fails to correctly handle adding and removing boot entries. Or Windows, which fails to boot if anything changes (disk order and such), even though everything is still available.

    • @[email protected]
      5•1 year ago

      This is technically only true if you have a single disk. The EFI spec allows for a single EFI partition per disk, so you can definitely have multiple in a system. I know this, because my setup has multiple EFI partitions. Windows doesn’t like it, and it will try it’s hardest to share a single one with Linux, but if it’s on its own disk, you can set it up with its own EFI partition using the command prompt.

      • Dandroid
        5•1 year ago

        This is exactly why I put my Linux install on a separate SSD. I even physically removed the windows SSD when I installed so nothing would get merged together.

      • Jajcus
        2•1 year ago

        Then my recent research was wrong - I tried to make it work and failed. Then read somewhere it is not supported. But it can be that it is valid EFI configuration, but not supported by Windows and some firmware implementations.
        I don’t think I have ever seen an EFI firmware which was not broken in one way or another.

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 year ago

        you can set it up with its own EFI partition using the command prompt.

        Ohh could you share how to do that? I resorted to removing the other drive physically

        • @[email protected]
          1•1 year ago

          I literally reinstalled Windows the other day and systemd-boot was still working, and so was Windows. This is all on a single disk.