I backed up my main box today. I obviously should have gone nowhere near any pc in my present state, but it felt like any other day. When I tried to restart after, I got a mutinous and overbearing windows 11 as the default install and all other options deleted. I obviously am having a terrible day. We're under weather alerts with Storm Babet in this part of the world.

The box is running on a liveslak usb atm, and that has mokutil, but not the efi boot manager, which I have access on the nvme of the main box. The entry is still there in the EFI partition. I just need to import it again, as the BIOS seems not to have them as options. That probably means it's thrown out the key.

Can somebody point me at a howto, and the slackware key, or am I better going through the 15.0 install dvd process?

Ah Microsoft. Still pulling the same old stunts after ~30 years...

Does running eliloconfig from the liveslak USB help? Have you disabled "secure boot"?

I thought I remember that efibootmgr is present in all those Live ISOs, no?

It is, according to the liveslak.log
efibootmgr-20191011_e8ce9fe-x86_64-4: tool to modify UEFI boot entries . [ 120K]

Thank you all for the replies. I'm back running on my system now. Yes, @rkelsen M$ are still doing it for maybe 40 years!

My elilo.conf was there. If eliloconfig has some power over UEFI, I missed the significance of that advice, and went a longer road.

I have the XFCE Liveslak iso from December 2022, and efibootmgr wasn't there. If it had been there, it wouldn't be trivial to delete it.But I could access off the / drive without issues. Slackware was wiped out of the boot order.

So I burned a 15.0 install dvd, reinstalled the "A" packages, let the install usb set up elilo and am back able to boot the thing. I have overwritten stuff that I've updated, but if you remember what started this, I have a backup from yesterday . Wine still works the one program it needs to work. So this is solved.

I have an MSI B550M Bazooka m/b, and if memory serves, linux needs to be first in the boot order, at number 0000. But I'll sort that out, as well as updating glibc preferably with the Multilib version.

rEFInd has saved my bacon many times and there's enough info at the website to solve most EFI problems
https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/
if you are willing to study a bit. Microsoft does still specialize in $uckage but i have two
windows11 partitions in my box and some old and new linuces as a kind of toolbox.
Wine never helped me much, just gives me a headache.

If it happens again with a windows update(Imagine that}:

Assuming you ran setup, and selected not to format at the target stage, you can cancelled out of the source selection go straight to configure and skip/cancel out of the other items.

The other option is to manually mount the root partition to /mnt and the efi parition to /mnt/boot/efi, mount --bind /dev /proc /sys to /mnt/dev /mnt/proc /mnt/sys respectively, chroot /mnt and run eliloconfig

that is a great one-line summary. having fell in that elilo trap multiple times, i have completed a cheat-sheet that you can correct of any typos.
https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:sl...edia#chrooting
eliloconfig instead of manual files copying feel safer for me.

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Does eliloconfig do any reordering of the boot order?

EDIT: I couldn't get that docs.skackware<etc> link in the last post. Will try again later.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...6/#post6441678

eliloconfig is not safer, it overwrites any changes to elilo.conf. It should only be used the first time and then copy the new kernel and initrd manually...that is the safer way.

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The overwriting of elilo.conf can be avoided by added this if test to eliloconfig:

Note that the eliloconfig script is writing to elilo.conf in three places.