Ah how I miss firefly and Wash 😭 Time for a re-watch!

A breakthrough!! I could not find the efi information on the partition it should be on the windows disk This is a major hint. The efi partition on this disk was empty. The efi partition lives on the Linux disk and will happily boot both Linux and windows. I cannot recall moving it from the windows disk manually. So there is still something to dig into here.

No wonder my virtual machine could not boot properly…

Thank you very much for sparring with me in this topic. It is solved now, sort of. I still need to actually fix it, but the solution is ready.

Check your partitions folks! They might not be where you think they are.

🥳

Often the only reason needed

I will have to check if secure boot is involved somehow. It’s not activated on purpose but who knows.

The uefi shell shows no files or directories in any of the partitions available so you might be correct.

Not on purpose.

As far as I know I have done the same as always when setting up these things. Only variation is updated Arch and systemd as boot manager

Tech details.

• The disk lives on pcie 03:00 and I pass this as a pci passthrough in virt-manager
• The drive has 3 partitions: EFI, data “C:”, boot
• Booting with this gets me the tianocore bootscreen and then dropped into UEFI interactive shell.
• This shell has 4 entries. BLK0, BLK1, BLK2 and BLK3

I am guessing the 4th one is unallocated space?

But if systemd-boot shouldnt play into this at all I guess my problem lies elsewhere.

Are you familiar with UEFI shell?

The mapping looks strange https://imgur.com/MEOJU7m.png

Shouldnt it say something about harddisk or blockdevice instead of just PciRoot?

BLK1 to BLK3 are marked with gpt so appears to be partition info, but who knows.

I might need to read up on uefi shell

Anyway, typing exit in this shell gives the tianocore EFI menus.

Here I can selct language, device manager, boot manager and boot maintenance manager.

Selecting boot manager gives the option to select the actual Samsung drive to boot from, but nothing happens when I do this. The screen flashes once as if it tries to start something, gives up and goes back to the menu.

Yes that’s basically it. But the vfio can be ignored for now because currently the windows install cannot be booted from libvirtd. I will deal with gpu passthrough and performance later. No error messages from libvirtd while booting the windows instance, I get dropped to a standard efi shell. Does systemd-boot do something extra with the boot sectors when booting from separate drives in dual boot?

Any thoughts you have to share on this is highly appreciated

Small victories 🥳

You and me both