I’m in a really weird situation, yesterday I installed Linux (Fedora Kinoite) on my mothers laptop (An old Asus F550C) and it worked perfectly fine. Great! Or so I thought.

We needed a few files from Windows 10, so I put that drive in, put the files on a USB stick, put the Linux drive back in and… Nothing? It recognizes the drive, but not the Linux boot option. I put the drive in my pc and it works fine, the boot drive is also still detected in the laptop just fine.

What the hell could it be??

  • The laptop is fine (Windows drive works perfectly)
  • The drive is recognized in bios (But not the boot option)
  • The drive works fine in my desktop and can boot to Fedora
  • The laptop can boot to the USB drive I used to create the install
  • Yesterday it worked just fine
  • I went through the bios, but can’t find any settings related to this (Secure boot did not fix it)
  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    1·
    12 hours ago

    Not impossible you just killed your drive somehow, though unlikely.

    Does the laptop have a manual boot menu you can try and select the drive to boot from?

    If it still boots off the LiveUSB, plug that in and see if you can view the filesystem of the drive having issues. Double check in a disk manager that it says it’s bootable, then reboot, go to the LiveUSB Grub menu, and see if there is an option to skip booting the LiveUSB and boot from disk. See if anything happens then. It’s only two levels of debugging, but one or the other is going to show if your drive is not cooperating.