UPDATE: I successfully dual booted Linux! and then I messed up...

Update from this post from the other day: What to know before Dual Booting Windows + Linux?

TLDR: I got it working, started learning, tried to fix a grub issue and borked the whole system.

So after considering all the advice, I went and disabled/prepped/backed up, and started the process. I managed to get Fedora KDE installed on another partition and everything was looking ok. I installed some programs, started learning for a few hours, but there was one small issue. The grub configuration from the video didn't really work. Windows wasn't booting by default, and when I tried to do the GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true to have it boot the last OS, it also didn't work. When booting windows, a message would flash by saying '/EFI/fedora/grubenv' not found.

Looking more into it, the video says to use sudo grub2-mkconfig -o boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg but I think the correct one now is grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg? I found this thread, but I couldn't run the first command because it gave a conflict error, and I think there were two versions of grub2 installed?

So anyways, I tried running the setup again, thought it was ok and did a reboot to test... and got hit with a black screen with minimal BASH like line editing is supported.

At this point I'm a little worried and lost, thinking maybe I wasn't ready to try this, and trying to get it back the way it was. I found this guide, but I get stuck trying to mount the EFI partition.

Any tips on where to go from here? Right now I plugged in the USB I used earlier, booted Fedora from it, and opened the terminal. Past that I'm a bit lost on how to fix grub.

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26 comments

Lesson I also learned when I started out with Linux… don’t fuck with grub unless you really understand what you’re doing! Borking grub is a right of passage imo.

I’m not sure how to fix your issue (I gave up on dual booting and just have windows in a virtual machine, so Windows doesn’t mess up grub).

I always keep backups of the working grub config in case I need to restore. Just boot into a version of Linux on a usb key and copy the working config.
- oh yes, did it multiple times... Now I'm using MX Linux, if I break something, I boot on the USB disk and click on the "repair boot", and tada! it works again. But yeah I always keep a backup of my EFI in case of too.
  
  Grub is still better than LILO :)
- I'll have to give this another try tomorrow when I'm more awake. I probably should have just asked here when I had grub issues in the first place.
  
  Just boot into a version of Linux on a usb key and copy the working config.
  
  So I guess this is what the guides are saying, but I seem to get stuck on the installation step with this error grub2-install: error: this utility cannot be used for EFI platforms because it does not support UEFI Secure Boot. Hopefully I understand it better once i'm more awake. Thank you though!
  
  You need to turn off secure boot in your bios maybe
  
  Turning off secure boot in bios did the trick for me when I setup Mint with Windows 11.

26 comments