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just did some partition table spring cleaning (deleted both windows recovery partitions, made a new windows recovery partition, deleted the EFI partition, created a new EFI partition large enough that Linux firmware updates should stop failing). time to reboot and pray!

narrator voice: the prayers were not answered. oh boy

shoutout to Lenovo for the nice ThinkPad graphical boot menu though (no matter which option I click, I return to this screen almost immediately)

used the Debian installer (on the drive we installed it from) in graphical rescue mode, which once I selected the root partition /dev/nvme0n1p7, helpfully mounted the EFI partition at /boot/efi for me, and then I told it to install GRUB in /boot/efi because that felt reasonable

and now Debian boots again! the rescue mode could really use some work and I'm not sure I used it correctly (should I have told it to go for the root partition instead?), but I'm grateful it exists, for sure

ooh it rebooted to flash an embedded controller and then it rebooted again and is now doing a “BIOS Self Healing backup” :)

firmware vendors love to run the fans at full blast during firmware updates just in case

used efibootmgr to delete the “Windows EFI Boot Manager” entry pointing at the old EFI partition's GUID and created a new one with the new GUID, but the same loader path and label. let's see if that works!

…that did not work! I had a suspicion this would happen. there's all this extra stuff inside the boot efivar that efibootmgr doesn't understand and can't modify, and which I guess is critical info for the Windows EFI Boot Manager. so I guess I'll use Windows Startup Repair™

if only I had listened to the Arch Linux Wiki…

downloading Win10_22H2_Swedish_x64v1.iso from Microsoft's site. very kind of them to let you just download an ISO if you're not using Windows (they explicitly say they sent you to that page because the media creation tool won't work on your OS)

copied the ISO to a flashdrive, asked our parter to reboot into Windows for us on her machine, copy the ISO off the flashdrive, and use Rufus to make it bootable; put the drive into the ThinkPad, chose Startreparation™ (🇸🇪), and seconds later it rebooted into Windows 10 :)

I still need to figure out how to get Windows 8.1 bootable again, but with that done I guess things are back to normal more or less.

moral of the story: if you delete the EFI partition and create a new one with the same contents as the old one, make sure it has the same GUID

using something called "EasyBCD" to see if I can get Windows 8.1 in the boot menu again

that worked! enjoy this rare screenshot of the last beautiful version of Windows

we will keep this pristine install of Windows 8.1 around forever because she is beautiful and must not be forgotten

Windows 8.1's Startup Repair™ didn't think it could do anything… I wonder if it just doesn't know the new Windows 10 bootloader or something. there is a Windows 8.1 install on this system too. oh well. let's see if we can do something with its command-line tools…

strangely enough the Windows 8.1 disc got me into an environment that offers an option to “exit and continue to Windows 10 Pro” and, when using the command prompt, the BCD utility whose name I forget only detected the Windows 10 install, not the Windows 8.1 one…

I wonder if it somehow booted the Windows 10 recovery partition. in any case, that “exit and continue” option took me to… GRUB, and the BCD utility didn't fix the EFI problem. time to make new Windows 10 installation media I guess (I have a disc but it degraded somehow alas)

@hikari well the EC controls the fans and while it's updating, it can't do that ^^

@hikari You want the extra thrust and case you miss the runway and need to do a go-around.

@hikari I really don’t think about this is about updates.

The default safety for fans is to always be on at full blast until the system understands it’s safe to bring them down, but it only knows that when it’s operating normally. Think of it like a fault-safety default. It’s the same reason fans go up a lot when the device is just turned on normally.