How Not to Resize EFI Partition Dual Boot Windows + Fedora

I have a Framework laptop with Fedora Linux and at some point I couldn’t install firmware updates. The error was not enough free space in my 100MB /boot/efi partition so I had to resize it somehow.

To give the EFI partition some extra room, I booted into Fedora LiveCD and used KDE Partition Manager to move mountains and earth and squeezed some room from the Windows partition into the EFI FAT32 partition.

However, in Fedora, it still refuses to realize that the EFI partition now has a larger size.

I found this guide which said “to create a new bootable FAT32 partition and copy the files from the old one.” Back into the LiveCD we go and sure enough it worked well booting into Fedora. df is now showing the newly added space in EFI.

But all is NOT well…

Previously, I could select “Windows Boot Manager” from GRUB screen, and Windows happily boots from its Bitlocker partition. The only time I had to provide the Bitlocker key was the one time after Fedora installed itself into EFI. Because the UEFI->Grub->Windows pathway is validated.

But now, the “Windows Boot Manager” item no longer works, because the partition UUID has changed. os-prober appears to only work when you are performing a new Fedora installation, so any attempts to grub2-mkconfig only ends in sadness and the removal of the existing “Windows Boot Manager” entry.

Worse still, manually selecting the Window from UEFI BIOS results in the UEFI->Windows pathway never being validated and thus the Bitlocker key needs to be provided every time.

Lessons Learned

• Instructions online for fixing Linux boot issues often never account for any Dual-boot
• Any piece of added security will make things more difficult