I have one Windows and one Apple M1 computer. Our project runs old docker containers and can't upgrade easily. I decided to run the x86 versions of containers on there and use them from my network. Corporate Windows has port blocking so I decided to install linux to a usb drive. I loaded a live install distro and installed it to a second USB drive.
The internal nvme laptop drive somehow had its partition table wiped along the way. I can see files on there in a partition restore tool but alas it isn't becoming bootable again from uefi after doing partition table restore. 😭

You probably installed the boot loader onto your Hard drive

Sucks to be you.

Rule 1 of Linux is never test in production.

You tested in production.

Now you need to reinstall Windows. If you're lucky your files will still be there.

You might be able to boot a Windows install drive and repair your MBR, but I don't know enough about how Microsoft configures their software.

The equivalent would be deleting your boot partition on an encrypted lvm disk.

Next time, take a full disk image before fucking around.

Lol. We have people restarting live vm clusters in the middle of the production by mistake XD I would fire you together with them.

You can recreate the Windows boot partition with the CMD of the recovery tool. Good luck however, it's pretty baldy documented and the commands are odd

@Tounai I’ve had to do that before. It was awful.

It was easier to just memorize the boot loader commands and type them in every time. And you’re right, they are odd.

@irene
Make an image/backup of your data drive, attempt to recreate the boot partition, and reinstall if that fails. If you target a different drive you should still be able to see it in windows after, unless it’s part of a volume group or encrypted or other such nontrivial scenario.

If it is, you should still be able to boot into the install as Tounai mentioned, and create an image or standard backup from there, reinstall as normal, and restore the image/backup.

It’s annoying, but the only difficult part is the windows boot loader documentation. chainloader +1 ftl

I’m the end I got it to a state where I Windows wouldn’t boot from the drives but I could pull all of the files off. I made a copy of the directories structure in WSL2 where I was doing all of my work. Now I’m running Linux that is basically a copy of WSL2.

@blindXfish If firing people because of ignorance is a good idea to you, good luck with getting promoted to any position where you have the authority to fire anyone.

Did you have regular snapshots for the VMs?

I miss simpler times when you just had bios