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I have two Fedora installations on the same SSD. We’ll refer to them as Fedora A and Fedora B. Fedora A was installed first on a 220 GB partition, and Fedora B was installed afterwards on a 260 GB partition.

  • /dev/nvme0n1p3 - Fedora A
  • /dev/nvme0n1p5 - Fedora B

Both partitions are LUKS encrypted. I used Fedora A as an offline vault for passwords and confidential documents. I intended to use Fedora B for personal matters.

Unfortunately, after Fedora B installation, I’m being directly booted into Fedora B. Pressing the Esc key gives me access to a different kernel version of Fedora B, but that’s it. I can’t boot into Fedora A.

I confirmed the presence of Fedora A by decrypting the partition and chrooting into it.

What can I do to boot into Fedora A?

Keynote: Both partitions are encrypted individually and system is UEFI

Destroy666
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Trojanstudy
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1 Answers1

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This answer explains how UEFI find bootloaders.

Booting your Fedora A partition might be as simple as finding it in output from efibootmgr and using efibootmgr -n with a suitable parameter, prior to rebooting your computer.

According to the systemctl man page the --boot-loader-menu option can bring up a boot loader menu upon reboot. It's likely that your computer also has a key binding to bring up that menu at boot time, but the details of that vary across different systems. If that boot menu comes up, you should be able to select your Fedora A partition from it.

There should also be a way to add your Fedora A partition to your Fedora B grub menu. This discussion describes difficulties in doing that, and ultimately recommends using a different boot loader, rEFInd, to handle the multiplicity of EFI partitions.

Eirik Fuller
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  • rEFInd works well with this sort of configuration, with one important caveat for this situation: rEFInd cannot read kernels from encrypted filesystems. If the configuration uses separate unencrypted /boot partitions, then rEFInd may be the easiest solution to the problem, as you suggest; but if the kernels are encrypted, then rEFInd won't help -- at least, not without reconfiguration. (Separate unencrypted /boot partitions could be created, or the kernels could be copied to separate directories on the ESP, but those workarounds both add work.) – Rod Smith Jul 22 '23 at 17:59