EDIT: So after all that, I was able to reinstall windows and download Macrium reflect + my backup. First time I tried to recover it, it failed for some reason, but the second time around I was able to restore it successfully. I’m now back where I started, thank you everyone!
I’m not done with Linux yet, but I think I’m going to try and run it in a good VM for the time being. When I’m done with classes, or when I get a separate device, I will give it another go.
Post 1: https://lemmy.ca/post/3709382
Post 2: https://lemmy.ca/post/3863438
Yesterday I could at least change the order in the BIOS to boot windows. Now I can’t even do that.
I think when reinstalling, I must have overwritten something (the EFI?). I saw some other people that had a very similar experience, and the advice was to reinstall Windows. I’m currently downloading Windows installation media on another computer and I’m going to try and reinstall windows now.
This just keeps getting worse and worse, and thank you for the help while I struggle through this.
If anyone has other tips, I’d appreciate it :)
That doesn’t matter, though. You can add a thousand bootloaders to a thousand disks. They just need to have a unique name. Windows installs itself to the UEFI “I don’t know what else to try, let’s boot this instead” bootloader which is rather silly, but Grub and systemd-boot don’t. They’ll just create their own little partition to chill out in.
If the entry was removed from the BIOS, the UEFI config probably got lost. There’s a good chance the bootloader is still installed on the disk but not listed as a notable option in the UEFI firmware variables.
You can fix this with efibootmgr or its Windows equivalent. I don’t know the exact commands, but I would go for the Windows version because it also sets a bunch of other environment variables when setting up the boot parameters.