Can not boot on usb or anything but opensuse

Question

A few hour ago I decided to reinstall opensuse tumbleweed. The installation is ok, I did not mess with efi partition, just asked opensuse to install /boot/efi, and that's it.

When I boot again on the grub, windows disappear, so I went on my quest to try to restore windows in the grub. osprobe or grub2-mkconfig do not work, they can't seem to locate windows.

So I finally choose to manually add windows in my grub (40_custom), but after a few try, I have the error "signature invalid", so I reinstall opensuse, but this time unchecking 'trusted boot'. Nothing change.

After a few research on google, I find rEFInd, a utility that should have helped me. After installing it, it could not finish the change in the efi partition, and now when trying to boot windows, it just display a still background (the rEFInd background), and do nothing.

Then I try to boot on opensuse, but all menuentry are broken ! So I reinstall again opensuse and try this time to obtain a windows iso to burn on my usb thumb stick to boot, repair the EFI, nuke opensuse (I have work to do on windows, I will go back on Opensuse later).

After download the image from microsoft in my language, I burn it with the tool provided by opensuse : 'Disk Image Writer'. It is burn on /dev/sdb (which was a fat partition).

When I restart my computer I go in the boot option, select the usb (only EFI is proposed) and black screen and reboot happen.

I would like to repair the EFI partition to boot on windows, I have the usb stick with windows 10 on it, can not boot, if anyone has an answer I take it.

Right now the only thing I can do, is to go inside the boot option (via bios), select a partition to boot (since the grub is still broken by rEFInd).

Answer 1

The thing is that I use dd like back in the day when it was not EFI system. Also, another problem is that the size of the files inside the iso of the windows 10 image (sources/install.wim) is large and make Disk Image crash or create a corrupt version of the file. The same with dd that can randomly crash with input/output error (E_FAIL).

Therefore, the usb stick had invalid data, no wonder that I could not boot.

I just recreate the usb in gtp, adding a fat32 partition. To not crash with the iso extractor, I mount the iso in a folder (mount -o loop) and do a normal copy. This time I could boot on the usb, and manually repair the EFI partition.

NB: As for why rEFInd crashed, it was because of 'unknow driver'. Furthermore, I had previous other os on my computer (fedora and debian) which were still recognized by rEFInd and displayed in the menuentry, even if the file were not here anymore.