I'm working on a laptop that had trouble booting from a Windows installer USB. After giving up, I installed the SSD (240GB) into my main machine that has two SSDs: a 240GB one with Pop!_OS and a 120GB one with Windows 10 for some games. When I booted into the Windows installer, I worried I'd confuse the two identical SSDs, so I powered off without selecting anything. I removed all drives except for the 240GB one and installed Windows there without issues. After putting everything back together, I found that just having my Pop! drive plugged in caused problems. Now, my SSD shows up in BIOS as Windows Boot Manager, even though Windows wasn't installed on it, and it wasn't even connected during the install process. A random FAT32 partition appeared, and my Pop! installation is gone. What happened, and is there any way to recover it?
5 Answers
It sounds like your BIOS switched the EFI settings to prioritize Windows. You can boot from a live Linux USB and use efibootmgr to switch it back to Pop!_OS. That fixed a similar issue I had recently.
You should definitely fire up a Linux installer USB and use efibootmgr to take control back. I faced the same problem a few weeks ago and was sure Windows wiped my Linux drive, but it was just a boot manager issue!
You might want to check if you’re looking at the correct drive that had Pop!_OS. Make sure it’s not just misidentifying it in BIOS.
Windows often assumes unallocated or formatted partitions are for its bootloader. If it sees an empty partition, it might try to take it over. This happened to me when preparing a drive for dual booting before even installing Windows.
That's frustrating! I didn't know Windows could do that just by detecting a partition.
Yeah, Windows can be tricky like that. Sometimes it happens after updates or installations, which can mess with your Linux setups unexpectedly.
That's wild. I thought I was safe doing a custom install!
I'm sure; it's the only Western Digital drive in the system.