Can't access Windows 10 after installing Linux

Question

I just recently installed Pop!_OS, a Linux distribution on my old laptop with Windows 10 installed on it and it didn't go well and everything went wrong. Upon installation, there was no dual booting option available so I went with a custom install (involves manually partitioning the drive and stuff) so I looked up how to do that and I just did the partitioning myself. Soon after restarting and finishing the installation, it didn't show me any option of what OS to boot into and just straight up booted into Linux. Hopefully it didn't delete my windows 10. How do I revert this now??

Answer 1

Hi MrVladistok,

You are going to need to completely re-install Windows 10,ther is no Windows 10 Boot partition on your drive.

You will need to create a bootable Windows 10 USB on another working Windows device

Click this link:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-downlo...

to download the Media Creation Tool (Click on Download Tool Now), with that you can download the latest Windows 10 ISO (Select Create Installation Media for Another PC), you can create a bootable USB flash drive (min 8GB) using that tool

Then, Boot your PC from the Installation Media you just created (change Boot Order in your BIOS) to begin installing Windows 10

At the start of the installation process, there is a Window with two large buttons, select the bottom button (Custom; Install Windows only) then on the next window, select each partition on your drive and delete it. When the whole drive is marked as unallocated space, select that and click 'Next' to begin the installation.

Since you previously had Windows 10 installed and activated on that PC during the installation process skip the steps which ask for a product key and select the option 'I am Reinstalling Windows 10 on this PC', and activation will not be an issue, your PC will have a digital entitlement stored on the Microsoft Activation Servers

Make sure you install the same Edition of Windows 10 (Home, Pro... etc.) you previously had installed to avoid Activation issues

Answer 2

Thank you so much for the help. After a whole day of frustration, I finally managed to get things back to normal. I'll never try to do that again......

Answer 3

Is this it?

Answer 4

Hi MrVladistok,

I am Dave, an Independent Advisor, I will help you with this.

To be able to provide you with an answer, I would need to see the partition table on your hard drive, is there a utility in your Linux distro that you can use to screenshot the partitions on your hard drive?