Wednesday, June 01, 2022

restoring a Windows 11 laptop - Samsung Galaxy Book2 Windows 11 restore install with wifi not recognized

A Samsung Galaxy Book2 laptop which came with Windows 11 Home pre-loaded was not booting into Windows after MX Linux was installed. Checking, found that the reason why Windows was not booting was that MX Linux had been installed on top of the 200 GB Windows partition. The other Windows RE partition which was undisturbed was just the recovery partition, not the C drive. 

Going into "BIOS" settings was a bit of a chore. If Windows was booting, the method is to press Shift+click on Start - Reboot. Without Windows, we need to boot with some bootable device - if it is Grub based, there would be an entry similar to "System Settings", choosing which the machine would reboot into the "BIOS" screen - which in this case also had a GUI. Booting 3 times unsuccessfully is also supposed to take us to that screen. Then we can go to Boot - Boot Device Priority and choose a USB drive as the first boot device. 

Edit: Pressing F10 on power-on also gives the option to choose boot device and or change UEFI boot settings.

Creating a Windows 11 install disk on a 16 GB USB drive using Linux did not work, following the method given here. Perhaps it was due to the NTFS formatting? Or maybe due to some wrong boot flag? Anyway, created a bootable USB drive Windows 11 installer using Windows 10 on another computer, which took 2-3 hours because it downloaded around 5 GB. Booting from that device, once the installation was completed and "Restore from username" was chosen, files were restored from Microsoft OneDrive and activation of Windows 11 Home was also shown to be completed

Before the installation could complete, there was the same issue as with the Samsung Galaxy Book Go LTE, which is that the built in wifi network adapter was not recognized by the Windows 11 installer, so installation would stop at the point where it requires you to log in to a Microsoft account. The workaround in this case was to plug in a USB wifi adapter which was known to work with Linux, which also worked with the Windows 11 installer.   

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