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I have installed OpenSUSE Leap on an MS Windows (10 Home) laptop and it now only offers Linux in the boot menu. How can I get Windows into the boot menu?

Leap is currently 15.1¹, having been upgraded at least once, though I do not remember which versions I have had. I do not remember ever telling it not to support booting Windows. The hardware is an Acer Aspire V Nitro laptop bought in Germany in 2015.

In /boot/efi/EFI I see only bootx64.efi, fallback.efi and MokManager.efi, while on my normal system (which can boot both Linux and Windows) /boot/efi/EFI has a subdirectory Microsoft/Boot.

I have these file systems:

  • /dev/sda1 (600 Mib) NTFS, “Basic data partition”, label Recovery (not mounted in Linux)
  • /dev/sda2 (300 Mib) FAT16 “EFI system partition”, mounted in Linux as /boot/efi
  • /dev/sda3 (128 MiB) “Microsoft reserved partition”, unknown file system, flags msftres (not mounted in Linux)
  • /dev/sda4 (190 GiB) NTFS “Basic data partition”, accessible in Linux as /run/media/Acer, flags msftdata, contains the Windows file system.
    • I have no reason to suppose these files are damaged; the file osver.txt says 10.0.17134.
  • /dev/sda5 (12 MiB), Linux-swap, flags swap
  • /dev/sda6 (450 MiB), NTFS, flags hidden, diag (not mounted in Linux)
  • /dev/sda7 (16.28 GiB) NTFS “Basic data partition”, Label Push Button Reset, flags hidden, diag (not mounted in Linux)
  • /dev/sda8 (40 MiB), BTRFS “primary”, mounted in Linux as /
  • /dev/sda9 (671 GiB), XFS “primary”, mounted in Linux as /home

I notice that I have a boot-repair-disk-64bit.iso dated 2018-07-17 on my normal system.

¹ I do realise that it is time to upgrade to 15.2, but that is a separate issue! (I have already downloaded it.)

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  • Is there any chance that Windows was installed using the legacy CSM boot instead of UEFI?
    – jsbillings
    Mar 11, 2021 at 0:25
  • Also, you have a windows install on a 190MiB volume? Are those units correct?
    – jsbillings
    Mar 11, 2021 at 2:10
  • @jsbillings: (a) I am afraid I do not know how MS Windows was pre-installed on the laptop: can I see that in the files? (b) You are quite right, MSW is installed in a 190 GiB file system (corrected, all partitions now listed as seen in gparted).
    – PJTraill
    Mar 11, 2021 at 21:51
  • If you go into the BIOS and turn off UEFI (if that’s possible), does it boot windows? The missing Microsoft directory might be because it was not installed as UEFI. However, if it was installed first, before Linux, it might have been installed with the right efi entries but the Linux install wrote a new vfat filesystem on top of the first partition. Do you see any Microsoft entries in the output of “efibootmgr”?
    – jsbillings
    Mar 11, 2021 at 21:57
  • @jsbillings: I may be a while in getting back to this, as we seldom want Windows on that system, but I shall check efibootmgr when I get the chance. MSW was installed before Linux.
    – PJTraill
    Mar 12, 2021 at 18:13

1 Answer 1

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I had a similar issue today since the last linux update (manjaro).
The bootmanager grub (2.04-21 on my machine) needed an additional configuration to detect windows and make it available in the boot menu.

Add GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false to /etc/default/grub and run update-grub or grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg not sure which one for suse.

However, I'd start investigating error messages from update-grub or grub2-mkconfig first, and then move on to partitions etc.

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  • Thanks for the suggestions. I need to read up a bit on update-grub / grub2-mkconfig, I think. I listed the partitions in case they suggested anything to anyone else. I may be a while in getting back to this, as we seldom need Windows on that system.
    – PJTraill
    Mar 12, 2021 at 18:08
  • I was getting very frustrated with my SSD/NVME setup, and having very little luck. Finally, I went to the EFI partition on the windows drive (in Dolphin, no less), and copied the "Microsoft" folder to /boot/efi/EFI. Ran os-prober again, and it found it! grub2-mkconfig added it to the menu, and it works great.
    – atc_ceedee
    Aug 6 at 19:27

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