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On 12/07/2021 12:13, fraser kendall wrote:
But. I dropped the ball on installation. The auto-encryption malarky (help me out please comrade meowski!) is enabled by default on a Lenovo Windows installation, and if it's not disabled (or an external backup of the appropriate unlocking code is made) prior to the Linux installation, booting into Windows won't be possible as the BIOS has been changed. My bad, and although I haven't yet needed to do this, I wouldn't make the same mistake again, just in case...
Hmm, I think I see what you mean but let me check, there's a lot of moving parts involved here. So by default the laptop turned up with:
Win10 (Home or Pro, that's important) Secure Boot = ON BitLocker = ON UEFI = ON Windows Fast Boot = ONIt sounds like you left the Windows install in place on the NVME drive but then shrunk it to make space for the Linux install right? And at that point to get Debian installed+running you would have done:
Secure Boot = OFF UEFI = OFF (or in CSM/Legacy/whatever they call it mode) Furthermore the NVME drive is presumably 4K sectors and GPT mode (not MBR).This would result in a working and bootable Debian system and as you say, Windows = noworky anymore.
Sound about right?This can indeed be fixed in several ways depending on how you want to come at it. The easiest way of all is to temporarily revert the firmware changes you made to enable Linux working so you can get back into the Windows installation again and fix it up so it can coexist with Linux.
I have to set systems up the other way, although dual boot machines are pretty uncommon these days at least among my clients so it's not something I need to do very often. When I do, I make sure to go through the admittedly annoying checklist to make sure that all of the important stuff can stay set = ON (you want UEFI and Secure Boot enabled for both operating systems) to keep Win10 Pro happy and then Linux is predictably much easier to deal with and most sane distros won't have any problem installing and running alongside it.
One warning though: Lenovo's firmware is famously... interesting in it's implementation. By which I mean buggy, non-standard and annoying. You have a silly special key to hammer on to access boot menus right? Not sure if your E14 is a more traditional one where you hit a weirdly labelled F key or whether you have a special "Lenovo button" that you have to use to turn on the laptop instead of the regular power button when you want to boot via USB or enter firmware. I've got a crappy Lenovo Yoga laptop with one of those. At least Lenovo don't ship the system firmware with SuperFish in any more though right? Probably ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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