I had a dual boot set up windows,endless on my acer e 5 aspire laptop. Due to windows being slow, my technician installed a new SSD and installed windows on it. He did not format the HDD which had windows and endless installed on it.
Now what was earlier my C drive is my D drive now.
I have some important files in my endless OS but I am not able to access them.
when I go to my D drive, I see the endless folder but it only has endless uninstaller file in it.
In theory, the following should work (can’t verify it as i don’t have a dual boot windows machine right here).
Theory:
The Endless OS dual boot setup tool creates a hidden file endless.img on your system drive and also modifies your boot environment to use GRUB instead of the default Windows bootloader. Now when starting your computer, GRUB gets loaded and presents you with either the option to boot Windows directly from your system drive, or Endless OS which is contained entirely in the above mentioned image file.
Idea:
As mentioned, this idea is untested. If you run the Endless OS installer and set up a new dual boot, you will get a fresh Endless OS installation on your system drive. When finished, boot back into Windows and copy the endlessos.img from your D:\ to C:\. It’s a hidden file, so you need to enable the corresponding option in Windows explorer.
Now the dual boot setup should boot into your previous Endless OS image.
Hello Egrath
Thank you very much for looking into my case.
I may have missed telling this-currently my windows boots from new ssd and not from erstwhile HDD windows boot file.
I will try your idea; just one question- you’ve asked to set up a new dual boot; do I install the endless on the pen drive or the full system installation ?
I have installed new EOS on my ssd and it boots fine.
It shows
Try hd0, 0: ntfs5: no eosldr
Try hd0, 1:ntfs5
Boots fine to new EOS.
But despite viewing hidden files my windows cannot find endless.img on the earlier c drive (now my d drive).
The endless folder only has one file - .
endless un installer
My current c drive also only has a similar
endless un installer file in the new endless folder.
I am still unable to access my old eos data.
One more, when my tech guy was installing my ssd, he removed my optical drive to put the ssd in and started the system on my old hdd just to check it, it booted straight to Windows and did not show the dual boot option.
To see the files, you have to check “Show hidden files” and uncheck “Hide protected operating system files” in the folders view options:
Copy over the file endless.img from your old disk to C:\endless, overwriting the existing file and boot into it.
