Trouble with my Fedora 25 dual boot installation
 

Hello,

I'm having trouble getting Fedora 25 installed on my desktop. I recently installed a new hard drive with Windows 7 on it. From Windows, I partitioned the drive. I then attempted to install Fedora 25 using the "automatic install" option. I'm now having two problems:

1) When I boot into Fedora, it locks up after I select the user to login as

2) When I try to boot into Windows, I get an error saying "BOOTMGR" is missing

Here's how my drive looks, from fdisk: http://paste.fedoraproject.org/525799/84166853/

And here is the result of "parted --list": http://paste.fedoraproject.org/525824/14841713/

Can someone please help me out?

Could you clarify what you mean by "locks up"? And does this happen before/during/after login? Can you login via console rather than gui?

It sounds like you may have overwritten your Windows boot with Grub. If you have your Windows installation disk, boot from it to repair your windows installation.

I'm assuming you're wanting to dual boot. Some more info about your setup would be helpful. E.g. are you using BIOS or UEFI?

Did you follow any guides e.g. this one to set this up?

By "locks up" I mean the screen "freezes". My mouse no longer moves and the keyboard won't do anything. This happens a few seconds after login. I seem to be able to log in as root through the console without any problems...

I will try to repair Windows using the cd as you suggested.

I believe I am using BIOS, but i'm not sure how to confirm this...

I didn't follow any specific guide.

Interesting. I would try logging in as root via console, create a new user (just for testing purposes) and then reboot and try to login via gui as the newly created user to see if the issue persists.

To find out if you are booted in Uefi or bios, type:
If you get a bunch of info, you're booted in UEFI, if not, you're in BIOS.

Also, when the screen freezes after logging in via gui, are you able to change to a tty? Usually via ctrl+alt+f1(-f7)? Or does it not respond to that either?

I added a new user from console, tried logging in as that user via gui, but it still locks up as before.

"ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars" said no such file or directory.

As for your last question, when I reboot and am shown the gui screen for selecting a user, I can hit "ctrl-alt-f2" to bring up the console. That seems to work fine.

Ok, so it appears you are booted via BIOS. When it freezes, is it on an empty black screen or does it freeze after it loads your desktop environment? What desktop environment and display manager are you using? Are you using Nvidia drivers?

It freezes only after I select the user at the user selection screen. Here's an example: https://fedoramagazine.org/wp-conten...-11-140604.png That screen works fine. I can move the mouse around and click on the options in the top right corner. but once I choose a user, it tries to load the desktop background but eventually locks up within 5 seconds or so.

Not sure which environment/display manager I have. Whichever comes standard with Fedora 25.

I don't know if if I'm using Nvidia drivers... I have never successfully gotten into the desktop. So I haven't installed any drivers...

I have not used Fedora personally, but that looks like the gnome environment.
should confirm.
From here, the steps I would take are as follows:
1) Boot into recovery mode and attempt to login as usual. If that doesn't work,
2) Reinstall your desktop environment, reboot and try to login. If that doesn't work;
3) Try another desktop environment. Depending on your exact hardware, I saw a number of threads mentioning the same/similar issue of users on Fedora with the Gnome desktop environment.

Hello milter, if you can get to a console with ctrl+alt+f2, then you can log in and execute some basic commands to gather more info.

'lspci' (without the quotes) will tell you more about your hardware.

Your issue with Gnome freezing 5 seconds after login suggests to me graphics drivers. Fedora Project is strict about including only the strictest "open source" software on the installation media, so Fedora .iso never includes proprietary drivers for Nvidia and other cards. But you are free as the end user to install these drivers.

First let's figure out which graphics card you have. An old Linux trick, you can follow 'lspci' with the | or 'pipe' symbol (shift-backslash on most US keyboards) followed by 'grep' to search for strings like 'VGA' or 'Graphics' to identify the chipset:

Now that you know that information (for example my computer outputs '00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 530 (rev 06)' so I know I have Intel HD 530) you can search and install the correct drivers, to get a Gnome desktop that won't freeze. :)

Many Fedora users' "non-free software" needs can be solved with RPM Fusion. For example if 'lspci' says you have Nvidia graphics, then I recommend to read here: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/nVidia

A final thought, if you are just looking for a quick "click and done" solution for new Fedora users, one possibility is Easy Life Project: https://easylifeproject.org/

Here's the output of "lspci | grep VGA": 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK104 [GeForce GTX 660 Ti] (rev a1)

I suppose your suggestion that this is the problem might be correct. However, when I booted up from the Livecd I didn't have any of these problems. As far as I can tell, it was using the same desktop environment.

If it is Nvidia drivers causing the issue, You should be able to simply reboot and use the opensource video drivers. But before doing so, I would boot into recovery mode and try to login first as I suggested above. Recovery mode will use open source drivers as opposed to Nvidia. This would confirm whether it is a video driver issue or something else

Update: I logged in using "GNOME on Xorg" instead of the default "GNOME" and things appear to be working...

Edit: I spoke too soon. It locked up after a few minutes of usage.

I have just tried booting up using rescue mode, but the same problems occurred.

I then tried "yum remove nvidia", but got "No match for argument: nvidia. Error: No packages marked for removal".

This seems to have done the trick! I updated drivers following the instructions from the linked site, and things seem to be working smoothly now. Yay!


My remaining problem is about Windows. When I turn on the computer now I see the grub screen with 3 Fedora options. How do I get back into Windows, and how do I get the Windows option to show up in that menu?

I have now gotten Windows7 to show up in the grub menu, but I still get the "BOOTMGR is missing" error when I select it.