Windows not showing up in bootloader after 42.1 install

Jtommi · December 13, 2015, 6:13pm

Hi,

I just installed Leap and unfortunately my Windows 8.1 doesn’t show up anymore.

Last year I installed 13.1
Yesterday I did the upgrade to 13.2 and then to 42.1.
Since Plasma was always crashing, I thought a fresh install would be a good idea.
So I reinstalled 42.1 from scratch.

Unfortunately I didn’t check my partitions before reinstall in order to reuse it the same way.
The partitions that the installer proposed seemed OK to me.
But now I don’t have W8.1 in the bootloader anymore (neither in the BIOS where it showed up as a boot option).

Can someone guide me to get Windows back with a minimum of reinstallation ?

Below a screenshot of my partitions. (there is a swap partition and NTFS, for data, on a secondary drive)
I have no idea what sdb1 and 3 are.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/11342301/snapshot1.png

gogalthorp · December 13, 2015, 6:24pm

Take a look into /boot/efi and see if there is still a windows directory.

Also note that if you mix boot modes ie 0ne OS as MBR boot and another as EFI boot they won’t see each other

Jtommi · December 13, 2015, 6:29pm

No, there is no windows directory.

The Windows install is out of the box, so should be EFI.

gogalthorp · December 13, 2015, 6:38pm

So you must have formatted the EFI boot partition when you installed. To my knowledge not formatting existing efi boot should be default and you would have had to told the installer to format it.

I guess you need some form of Windows repair. Sorry, but I don’t do windows

To be safe backup all of the EFI boot partition just in case the Windows fixer also reformats the partition.

Jtommi · December 13, 2015, 8:47pm

I will do that.
So basically, I need the Windows files and the linux files on that same EFI boot partition ?

gogalthorp · December 13, 2015, 10:44pm

Yep that is how EFI boot works. The EFI BIOS looks for a efi boot partition(s) then using the table in it’s flash selects the default boot OS and goes to that directory. Also chaining OS’s goes through those files. Each EFI bootable partition is listed there.

Jtommi · December 17, 2015, 9:09pm

Thanks for your help.
I got it to work with this method.

I have to add that I had to create the folders \EFI\Microsoft\ and \EFI\Microsoft\Boot.
Since these were new folders, there was also no BCD file.
And I had to use D, not C, but that can be looked up in the volume list.

After that I reinstalled openSUSE, mainly to check if it would erase the partition again, but that wasn’t the case.
So it seems that I did chose to erase that partition as suggested by gogalthorp .