By Sherif Atitebi | July 12, 2026
I put Fedora on an HP Pavilion last week. The laptop already had two drives in it, an SSD and an HDD, and I had just finished putting Ubuntu on a completely different machine days before. My brain was still in installer mode.
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The setup was a little cursed going in. The HDD used to be the only drive, so it had the original Windows on it. Then I added the SSD because the HDD moved at the speed of continental drift, and I put a fresh Windows on the SSD. So I had two Windows installs, one of which I actively did not want.
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The plan was simple. Wipe the SSD, put Fedora on it, leave the HDD alone, and still be able to boot the old Windows if I ever needed it. Simple plans are usually where the trouble starts.
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1. Getting into the boot menu
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HP does not make this obvious. There is no friendly "press this key" message that stays on screen long enough to read.
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▸ F9 (one-time boot device menu)
▸ F10 (BIOS setup)
▸ Esc (startup menu, which lists the others)
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You have to start tapping the moment you press power. Not a second later. I missed it twice and had to sit through a full Windows boot both times, which is its own kind of punishment.
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2. The BIOS setting that hides your drives
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This one gets people. If the SATA mode is set to RAID instead of AHCI, the Fedora installer may not see your drives at all. You get to the disk selection screen and it is just empty, and you start questioning whether the laptop has storage.
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Switch it to AHCI in the BIOS and the drives show up. Worth checking before you get halfway through the installer and start googling error messages at 1am.
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Secure Boot I left on. Fedora signs its bootloader properly, so it just works. That was the one thing that did not fight me.
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3. The screen where you can ruin everything
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Fedora's installer shows you every drive it can find and asks you to pick. This is the screen where you slow down and read.
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▸ Select the SSD only
▸ Leave the HDD unchecked
▸ Choose Automatic storage configuration
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Because only the SSD is selected, the installer wipes it and lays out Fedora, and never touches the HDD. The old Windows sits there completely untouched. The fresh Windows on the SSD is gone forever, which was the entire point.
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I read that screen about four times before clicking. Selecting the wrong drive here is not a mistake you undo.
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4. Where is Windows in my boot menu
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Fedora finished, I rebooted, and GRUB came up with Fedora and nothing else. No Windows entry. For a moment I assumed I had nuked the HDD.
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I had not. Fedora just does not run os-prober by default, so it never went looking for other operating systems. You have to tell it to.
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▸ Enable os-prober in the GRUB config
▸ Regenerate the GRUB config
▸ Reboot
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Windows showed up in the menu after that. The HDD was fine the whole time. The panic was free.
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Wrapping up
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Nothing here was hard. It was just a series of small things that are only obvious after you have already hit them once. The boot key, the SATA mode, the drive selection, the missing Windows entry. Four little walls, one after another.
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Two installs in one week on two different machines, and neither one went cleanly. I am starting to think that is just what installing Linux is.
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The HDD still has its Windows. I have not booted it once since.