On Mon, 4/27/2026 7:20 PM, Lars Poulsen wrote:

I need to confess that I gave up on getting Windows-11 to work at this time, because my most urgent priority was to get Fedora Linux F43 running again, so I reinstalled Fedora in "take the whole machine" mode.
I suspect that it was a cascading series of problems, beginning (conjecture) that during the almost 4 months I had not booted into Windows, the laptop finally became eligible for the 25H2 upgrade, and that installing the feature upgrade also tried to upgrade the recovery partition, which failed because it ran out of space. And (still conjecture) it also tried to fix the secure boot key in the EFI partition, and breaking that too, because that (small EFI partition served double duty as Linux /boot/efi. Because Linux was installed after Windows, it had been set to boot into Grub, from where I was booting Windows by selecting "Windows Boot Manager" from the Grub boot menu.
And the Windows update script was not set up to handle this kind of system.

So for now, the little ASUS laptop, purchased for $150 at an after-Christmas sale in 2022, is a pure Linux machine. Bringing it up after this re-install has its own issues, but they do not belong in this newsgroup.

Thank you for the detailed responses. I have learned a lot about how the system administration issues in Windows and Linux are both similar, but also different.

I still don't know how to Boot Repair Fedora, so don't
break the boot on that. The Yannbuntu Boot Repair disc
doesn't seem to work with Fedora. You'd think GRUB2 is
GRUB2, but for some reason that does not seem to be the case.

After my experience with Paragon PM14 (being for such software,
relatively well-behaved), I thought testing the others would not
reveal such much crap-ware behavior. Boy, was I wrong.

When I tried to run Raxco PerfectDisk (bankrupt and out of business)
in trial mode, and I ticked the box "Prepare for shrink", the
tool responded "this is only available in the Pro version",
and as you can imagine, I set a new record for utility removed
in least amount of time :-) The idea of Prepare for shrink, is
they would move MFTMIRR out of the way.

It would seem, it's going to require a dis-mount of a partition
at a minimum, to do some of these things. A reboot neatly solves
the problem. And the rather cheesy interface on the reboot, means
you're hoping any problems it encounters, it prints a message
on the screen. When it told me it was "ntfsresize", this is my
shocked face :-)

*******

As for Linux installs, I *always* install them in Custom mode.
As that's when I discover some of them don't have partition
preparation capabilities in their Custom section. On one
distro, it does not even inform you what kind of partitioning
it would like. Which is beyond funny. I don't mind using my
available tools here, to prep a disk suited to their liking,
but if you don't tell me what you want, I'm not Kreskin. In
some cases, not even the forum for the product, has a detailed
discussion on that part. I guess "that's too simple for us"
is their attitude.

This is definitely the Year of the Linux Desktop.

Paul



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