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Grub can't find windows bootloader

jp flag
Aryan Sethi

I'm struck in a terrible terrible situation. PLEASE help me out here !!

Story

I have an Acer Nitro(intel i5 8th gen cpu) dual booted with Windows 10 and ubuntu 20.04. I have 2 disk drives- one is 128GB SSD and other is 1TB HDD. My windows was installed on the SSD with my other stuff on the HDD.My ubuntu was installed on a 300 GB partition in my HDD.At this time, both windows and ubuntu were working fine.

I decided to remove ubuntu, so I deleted the 300GB volume of ubuntu from the windows disk manager(didn't remove grub). When I restarted the computer, it directly booted on to a grub terminal where I wrote ls , found the location of my windows bootmgf.efi file. Then wrote chainloader <path to efi file>;boot. At this point it booted my system to windows but when i restarted, it again went back to the grub terminal. To solve this I followed some commands from the internet and ran them in the windows command prompt in 'troubleshoot windows mode' (with that blue screen). At this point, I did some mistake I DONT KNOW WHAT and now when i restarted my PC, it said "NO Startup application found" or something like that i.e no OS found.

I could still enter the BIOS mode though and saw that my drives were being detected.

After this I put back the pendrive I used to install ubuntu, installed ubuntu. Now here in ubuntu, I can see the disk space being used by my C drive that it used to and all the stuff is present in my D drive(which was on windows). But now whenver I restart, it automatically opens ubuntu. How can I recover my windows back.

EDIT I flashed the windows10 ISO image on a USB drive. Now how can I recover my previous windows ?

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user10489 avatar
in flag
user10489
You will need to boot windows installation media in rescue mode and try to do a boot repair.
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jp flag
Aryan Sethi
How can I do that ?
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cc flag
ubfan1
Have you tried the EFI menu (some function key at power-up) to select a device or Os to boot? Select Windows. Then get ubuntu/grub out of the boot list,or put Windows before ubuntu in the list.
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jp flag
Aryan Sethi
@ubfan1 I'm really sorry but I'm very new to all this. Are you asking me if I opened the BIOS mode at the startup? If yes, I did. I navigated to boot section but only Ubuntu is available there
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ru flag
Thomas Ward
Since your question is how to restore Windows after it is not here, you need to go to Superuser - since you have Win10 on a USB image, you now need to seek **Windows** support, and that's not an Ubuntu issue.
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jp flag
Aryan Sethi
if I'm able to access the grub terminal. I'll be able to run the chianload command. How can I enter into the grub terminal on startup
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Score:0
avatar Ubuntu
jp flag
Aryan Sethi

So the problem was that I had accidentally deleted the windows EFI modules from the first partition, so although, all my windows data was intact, grub wasn't able to boot windows.

Solution was as suggested by everyone - I plugged in the Windows USB installation media, went on to 'fix bootup' option and after that my windows started working. At this point, the scenario changed to 'Installing Windows after ubuntu', so the boot loader control was given to the windows bootloader instead of grub. I opened ubuntu using bios, deleted the UBUNTU directory from the /boot/efi/ partition, restarted, entered into windows automatically and then removed the ubuntu partitions.

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Elon Musk
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