My laptop is (maybe was) Linux and Windows 10 dual booted. I was reinstalling the Linux OS and in the process I accidentally formatted the Windows 10 boot partition. At least I think it is the boot partition because I don’t really know how Windows works (or doesn’t work amirite).

This is the lsblk output:

$ lsblk -f
NAME        FSTYPE     FSVER LABEL [...] MOUNTPOINTS
nvme1n1     zfs_member 5000  zroot [...]
├─nvme1n1p1 vfat       FAT32       [...] /boot/efi
├─nvme1n1p2 swap       1           [...] [SWAP]
└─nvme1n1p3 zfs_member 5000  zroot [...]
nvme0n1
├─nvme0n1p1
└─nvme0n1p2 ntfs

The nvme0n1p1 is the one related to booting. I accidentally formatted it.

I have a Windows 10 USB prepared. I tried looking online and I never found a question asking exactly for this. The ones I found that were similar enough suggested different commands.

Anyone has experience with this?

Thanks in advance.

  • loathsome dongeater@lemmygrad.mlOPEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    You are gonna have to help me out more because it seems there never was a windows boot partition and you were right. There is a windows reserved partition and the actual c:\ partition. So my guess is that the windows boot files were on the partition that also housed the linux boot stuff (refind and so on).

    So I tried using the command prompt from a live Windows USB. But I could not mount the linux boot partition at all. It is a normal fat32 partition but Windows does not recognise it as such. It could be because of the way it was created: i copied some mkfs command from a guide. Because of this I could not assignletter this partition or do any of the cmd sorcery I found online.

    I guess I could try recreating this partition in a way that Windows is not deeply offended by it. But apart that I am out of ideas.

    • pinguinu [any]@lemmygrad.ml
      2·
      2 months ago

      Hmmm I don’t know why that could be. Did you set it as an EFI partition? Check that, and if you currently can’t do it, you could try your idea, or copy the windows boot files to some other drive and then copy those to the efi partition using Linux. You could also install windows or grab the windows files on some other unrelated computer (assuming it’d use efi).

      • loathsome dongeater@lemmygrad.mlOPEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        I looked into it today and turns out the whole disk that the partition is on was using the dos table rather than gpt. I really don’t know how I did that but that is besides the point. So I ended up having to nuke the whole disk and reinstall linux. Haven’t yet tried to have windows boot yet but at least found out one thing that was wrong.