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Cake day: April 13th, 2024

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  • This week I heard from a network group lead of a university hospital, that they have a similar issue. Some medical devices that come with control computers can’t be upgraded, because they were only certified for medical use with the specific software they came with.

    They just isolate those devices as much as possible on the network, not much else to do, when there is no official support and recertification for upgrading. And of course nobody wants to spend half a million on a new imaging device when the old one is still fine except for the OS of the control computer.

    Sounds like a shitty place to be, I pity those guys.

    That said, if you were talking about normal client computers then it’s inexcusable.


  • Pre-UEFI they were fighting over the boot sector, sure, but now that everything is more well defined, and every OS can read the FAT32 ESP? Never seen it…

    At worst the UEFI boot entry is replaced. There are some really shitty UEFI implementations out there which only want to load \efi\microsoft\boot\bootx64.efi or \efi\boot\bootx64.efi, or keep resetting you back to those.

    Assuming you were dumped into Windows suddenly, you can check if you have the necessary boot entries still with bcdedit and its firmware option

    bcdedit /enum firmware
    

    If you just have a broken order you can fix it with

    bcdedit /set {fwbootmgr} displayorder {<GUID>} /addfirst
    

    If you actually need a new entry for Linux it’s a bit more annyoing, you need to copy one of the windows entries, and then modify it.

    bcdedit /copy {<GUID1>} /d "Fedora"
    bcdedit /set {<GUID2>} path \EFI\FEDORA\SHIM.EFI
    bcdedit /set {fwbootmgr} displayorder {<GUID2>} /addfirst
    

    Where GUID1 is a suitable entry from windows, and GUID2 is the one you get back from the copy command as the identifier of the new entry. Of course you will have to adjust the description and the path according to your distro and where it puts its shim, or the grub efi, depending on which you’d like to start.

    Edit: Using DiskGenius might be a little more comfortable.















  • I wanted a mainstream option but not Ubuntu, and one that was preferably offered with KDE Plasma pre-packaged.

    So I ended up deciding between Debian and Fedora, and what tipped me to Fedora was thinking: Well SELinux sounds neat, quite close to what I learned about Mandatory Access Control in the lectures, and besides, maybe it will be useful in my work knowing one that is close to RHEL.

    Now I work in a network team that has been using Debian for 30 years, lol. Kind of ironic, but I don’t regret it, now I just know both.

    And fighting SELinux was kind of fun too. I modified my local policies so that systemd can run screen because I wanted to create a Minecraft service to which I could connect as admin, even if it was started by systemd.


    1. Ah that makes sense then. I was confused why you would wipe your ESP over and over when it was shared.

    I don’t know why it comes off as hostile, it wasn’t intended that way. Sorry for not expressing it better!

    If the last sentence came across badly, that was more meant to be incredulous that people accept all these workaround instead. There are other comments in here that go to ridiculous lengths to enforce separation, like using the UEFI boot menu to select a disk manually. To me even having two ESPs seems overly cautious, and against the design philosophy. Sharing one ESP is really not an issue (at least as long as you know you’re doing it, as you unfortunately found out the hard way).


  • First of all: You don’t have to reinstall Windows to get it’s bootmgr EFI and supporting files back into the ESP. Installing those from the CLI in from a booted install media is possible, I did it before. You can even install all of Windows manually if you ever need to, it’s just annoying to do with the windows command line tools.

    Secondly: I’m not familiar with all distro installers, but surely you can just not format the ESP? Worst case scenario you’d have to use manual disk formatting I guess, but it’s not that difficult.

    Thirdly: You said Grub doesn’t show the disk. If you mean the Grub command interface didn’t show the disk, then the issue is deeper, at a UEFI or hardware level. If you mean there are no boot entries for a Windows install to be selected, then it could be that they were not generated because the Windows bootmgr EFI was not found when Grub got installed. Sometimes just booting back into Linux and running os-prober again might be enough, if the Windows bootmgr EFI is still around. On my distro the os-proper is automatically run when I run grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

    I’ve always used a shared ESP for my dual boot systems and I certainly don’t reinstall one OS as the result of a change with the other.