This is what I'm thinking happened. I already said this in another comment but will expand here because this comments refers specifically to the EFI partition. Here's the weird thing, 3 days ago, I had 2 SSDs:
- 1 with 3 partitions of Windows, one EFI part., one recovery part, and the regular C: local where my files were.
- On my secondary SSD, I had Fedora installed. If I'm correct, I had a /boot, and /home(?) don't remember if anything else.
I decided to do a clean install of Win11. When I did, I had both SSDs connected to my laptop, and when I finished the installation, this was how it was divided:
- 1st SSD: one, full 2TB C: Local disk, with no partitions.
- 2nd SSD: One EFI partition, one recovery partition, and one "empty" partition.
It was highly confusing, because I thought I had Fedora there, my immediate thought was that Win11 just straight up ravaged both my SSDs and decided "fuck it, let's install wherever the fuck I want" and it did. HOWEVER I could still get into Fedora and use it normally. Still had all the apps and programs I installed, everything was correct. So I assumed the drive still belonged to Fedora.
When I installed EOS, I chose "Erase Disk" on the secondary SSD (the one with Fedora, the one that had this "EFI partition" that didn't have before. I think when I erased that SSD, I erased the Windows EFI partition and couldn't boot as a result. And that's why the BIOS was not recognizing the OS, but at the same time I could just mount the SSD in EOS and just look t my files normally. So I think that's what happened, but honestly I'm not even sure of how it happened.
I chose sysremd, I didn't have time to fix the issue as I needed my laptop for work so I just did a clean install of everything once again. I think I will keep trying Fedora but I will read the documentation of EOS first so I can understand what I'm doing, I can't afford to make the same mistake again lol. I think what happened is that I accidentally erased the Windows EFI partition somehow and that's why it was not going in.
Is there an actual difference between those? Is one better than the other or it's just the OS giving options?