Is there a way to recover a failed dual boot of Kubuntu and MS Windows on a Lenovo L14 laptop?

[pwrcul]

My second effort to do a dual boot a Lenovo laptop failed. It automatically boots Windows and ignores Kubuntu.

I want to make a new Windows 11 laptop from Lenovo dual boot Kubuntu 24.04 LTS.
The laptop is a gift for a friend.
I carefully followed instruction at https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/ho...-with-windows/ until it came to making partitions for Kubuntu and swap.
There I see in the mount point column in the table from Partition Manager that i failed to edit fhe EFI partition line so it reads /boot/efi when I did the install
The laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad L14. Earlier I had succeeded to dual boot a Lenovo Z13, but I forgot the details over some months.
I got a warning but did the installation anyway.

Is there a way to recover?
I know about Efiimanager but have never used it.
I tried to redo the Kubuntu install dialog but that does not work.
I am risk adverse now and wondering how to proceed.

[oshunluvr]

Generally, one would boot to a live USB, manually boot into the install using the GRUB console. Then once you have Linux booted up, then run "sudo update-grub" and "sudo grub-install" and re-install grub to your drive. Then it should boot to Linux and Windows should be in your GRUB menu.

[oshunluvr]

I trust you didn't mess with /boot/efi - the EFI partition. The warning you probably got was it telling you it was too small. It's not. Just some developer got it in their head that the EFI partition should be 300MB which isn't necessary. 60GB is more than enough to dual boot Windows and Linux. I think windows usually defaults to 150 or 256MB so you get the warning from Kubuntu installer.

[pwrcul]

Thanks, Oshunluvr,

I read through your suggestion and observations and looked up some things on the web.
The warning from the kubuntu installer was to make sure I did right by EFI or it was likely not to boot. (It did not boot) .

The relation of EFI and GRUB is bewildering to me so maybe I will get educated on it.
I had not realized I can work from the live kubuntu install media that way.....

I don't have a full plan. I will explore first.

[oshunluvr]

Another possibility is Windows made the EFI partition in NTFS format which Kubuntu would not recognize as a proper ESP partition. Unfortunately without knowing what exactly the actual warning was, there's no way for anyone here to advise you on what to do next.

You can boot to Kubuntu on a USB drive and select "Try" instead of "Install" and it boot to the desktop. From there you can review your partitions and even manipulate them. Feel free to post what you find and hopefully someone will have some help.

[pwrcul]

Good afternoon. I got a better night's sleep but had matters to attend to all morning.

Thanks for your words of caution.

I will call Lenovo tech support and see if I can roll back what I did or replace my Win11 with a fresh copy.
[You can't roll back after what I did, but I can download a fresh copy of Win 11. I got a link.]

I have not really done anything with either Kubuntu (impossible as dual boot failed, but maybe with the live USB stick) or Win11. yet....

I would like to try some things to recover and then put on a fresh copy of Win11 if they fail. (I am confident of
getting dual boot right this time.)

[krodrig2]

I have not tried this but i do remember while trying MxLinux there are a lot of tools that are pre-configured one of them is for fixing the bot loader, downl load that and use the mx tool from the live cd.

[krodrig2]

I usually use rEFind boot manager to dual boot. https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

[Qqmike]

I usually use rEFind boot manager to dual boot. https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

When all else fails. Or, in any case, it's a good way to go. 👍👍

[pwrcul]

I spent much of Monday trying to nail down the Lenovo solution to my non booting Kubuntu part of the dual boot installation onto a Lenovo L14 Thinkpad laptop with MS Windows 11 Pro.

I had to use a different Lenovo Windows PC installation in the effort to replace Windows on my laptop meant for my friend.
I got help from Lenovo's technical support, particularly from a tech named CJ who guided me to download hardware updates, etc. and in the end he burned a recovery USB key he put into the US Mail which should arrive in a few days.

It will be a version of MS Windows 11 Pro for the L14 laptop. (See Lenovo Digital Download Recovery Service (DDRS) - Download the files needed to create a Lenovo USB Recovery key.)

(Since Lenovo bought IBM's PC desktop business years ago, at last I had the chance to feel the comfort of Big Blue vicariously coming to my aide.) But the Lenovo PC to which I had downloaded the recovery key to had a disk
drive that was faulty or the 32 GB media (ABLAZE brand on Amazon) was not recognized because it was faulty--I tried several USB sticks, though I can write and read them on my KDE Neon Linux desktop.

I now have time before the Recovery Key arrives try to use my time while waiting to see what is possible in Linux to resolve the issue.

[jlittle]

Since you're determined, you could try a chroot. You'd boot into the installer, Try kubuntu, find where you Kubuntu is, chroot into it, and then run sudo update-grub. People used to do this more than they do now, so google has not found many hits, but https://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/ch...-repair-system explains things.

[pwrcul]

I will try to do something like jlittle suggests above which at least one other suggested.

The partitions of the SSD in the box have the following allocation.The L14 boots MS windows and ignores Kubuntu because of my mistake/




This will be like Jlittle's suggestion above which has been made before.

[jlittle]

Hi all, I would like to advise the OP as to whether they need to set GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false in /etc/default/grub so that update-grub finds Windows.

[pwrcul]

I had a limited time to work on the chroot approach and ran into a problem trying to open up some of the kubuntu installer etc directories.
I would like to pursue that some more and ask for suggestions if I understand well enough what I am doing.

Meanwhile Lenovo mailed a USB drive with a newly written version of MS Windows Pro and it arrived. I will hold off on installing that for awhile so I can try the suggestions I received. I would be delighted if they are an alternative.

John Little alerted me to a problem as he states above: "Hi all, I would like to advise the OP as to whether they need to set GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false in /etc/default/grub so that update-grub finds Windows."
I found this page that has a solution: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/12/...ux-distros-fix
(It is not clear what he means when he writes "advise the OP as to whether they need to set GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false"
I am not sure if OP here means the operating system or something else.)

[Snowhog]

OP means ‘Original Poster’; you.