Hey everyone, I have 3 seperate SSD’s, two 2TB SSD’s and a single 1TB SSD that has Windows 11 on it. I’m running Bazzite OS on one of my 2TB SSD’s, and I used to have Windows 11 on my primary 2TB SSD but I just wiped it to install CachyOS on it so that I can have 4TB of total SSD storage for games on Linux. My current set up is the 1TB SSD has Windows 11, and the two other seperate 2TB SSD’s have Bazzite and CachyOS on their own drives.
My primary OS at the moment is Bazzite, and has been for about 6 months now, but I finally stopped being lazy and copied over everything from my old 2TB Windows install to the new 1TB Windows install and then installed CachyOS on the now free’d up 2TB SSD. But after installing CachyOS on what used to be my primary Windows drive, I no longer have access to booting into Windows. I keep a Windows partition for things that don’t work on Linux.
When I go into my motherboards boot options, I’m presented with 3 options. 1. Bazzite (default boot option for me) 2. CachyOS 3. UEFIOS which only lets me boot into CachyOS. My Windows files are still safe and accessible on the 1TB SSD so I know everything is still there, I just don’t have a way to boot into it anymore. GRUB gives me the same boot options as the motherboard does, so I’m locked out of my Windows install for now.
How do I regain access to my Windows install? Again, everything is still there, I can access my 1TB SSD through either of my Linux installations and see all the files there I just can’t find a way to boot into it.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
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You may have destroyed the windows boot loader, which is required for booting windows. Or, more likely, your grub needs to be reinstalled. Reinstall grub first (reinstall package or with the correct grub command) if that doesnt work you may need to use a windows rescue disk to repair the boot loader(could destroy your linux partition, make a backup!) or reinstall windows and then install linux again(can also wipe your data!)
Try grub first, the other way is the nuclear option. There may be more than one way to repair grub, I recommend you try multiple ways.
Also: Supergrub can do magic, but is a bit cubersome to use.
I also dimly remember there being a linux friendly rescue system that can repair windows boot, so you have plenty of options. Good luck!
First, which drive is your boot drive?
One of my two separate 2TB SSds running Bazzite is my boot drive. I have 2 more seperate physical drives, a 1TB running Windows and a 2TB running CachyOS.
Edit: Not sure if it matters, but my 2TB SSD running (what used to be my primary Windows install) CachyOS is in the first NVME slot, my other 2TB SSD running Bazzite (primary boot option) is in the 2nd NVME slot and the 1TB SSD running Windows is in the 3rd NVME slot.
@AmosBurton_ThatGuy Ok, Catchy is based upon Arch, and I’m not sure how you can tell grub on arch how to look on other drives for bootable OS’s. In Ubuntu it’s an argument in /etc/default/grub, but arch it is entirely different and I’ve not run multiple OS’s on it. But with Ubuntu there is a grub argument that says to look on other drives for bootable OS’s and you need to enable that for it to find OS’s on other drives. There must be something similar in CatchyOS, but since I haven’t played with it, and when I was using Arch it was the ONLY OS, I don’t know where to find that. Alternately, you could just switch boot drives in BIOS, or hold F8 after a reboot to select the Windows drive. I do understand though that it is a lot more convenient to have it in the boot menu, unfortunately I haven’t any experience with Catchy or even Arch with multiple OS’s so can’t help with that.
Even in my motherboard’s BIOS, the Windows bootloader is no longer showing up. I’m wondering if by removing what used to be my primary Windows install, it also removed the Windows bootloader. I still have a USB with a live install of Windows, can I use that to re-add the Windows bootloader?
Thank you for the help BTW! It’s much appreciated.
@AmosBurton_ThatGuy Yes you can, but I’ve not been using Windows frequently enough to remember how, but if you google re-install windows boot block I believe you can find instructions.
It’s probably a problem with the UEFI, the windows info got overwritten, and you can probably fix this with efibootmgr
It happened to me too, but unfortunately it was some years ago and I’m not at home to find the related notes that I took. I remember there was a windows utility to rewrite the boot loader. But probably in your case the boot partition is still okay, just the UEFI entry got overwritten and you just have to add it back manually.
Check the troubleshooting section of the wiki page to have a tip on the windows booting location
How did you copy windows from one drive to another? It is likely this step broke your Windows install.
