over the past day i swapped my computer case to a new one. its real shiny and nice (fractal define 7, all white)

it was a real PITA to put together because i have so many hard drives, i had to configure the case (which is modular and nearly fully disassemblable) into “storage mode” which involves taking apart most of the case and putting it back together differently. i also had issues following a lot of the instructions since i was trying probably too hard to plan ahead and make sure cable management would be easy and good when i was done

spoiler alert unless you have custom length cables no matter how much time you put into cable management its always going to be like 75% good at best. you just can’t do enough with on-hand cables of various colors, lengths, thicknesses, materials, flat v. round, etc.

once it was finally put together, it wouldn’t boot. which is an issue, of course. i just swapped cases, why would it not boot? most everything seemed fine in the bios, it detected my main m.2 ssd, but it wouldn’t let me boot from it! and my motherboard is one where if you have an m.2 sata SSD installed, it’ll disable the 1st regular sata port. i thought that was the issue at first but i had actually not mistakenly plugged a drive in to that disabled port.

so long story short, part of the case migration was to no longer dual boot with windows and linux. so i didn’t actually migrate my linux drive over…which had refind on it. so my boot manager was now totally missing, since i guess there was no remnant left on my windows os drive (even though it had the EFI partition). it’s still quite odd that i wasn’t able to boot from the disk manually since all my other random data drives were showing up as boot options in my bios but not the only actual OS disk

so the fix (also have to make sure you have CSM and secure boot configured correctly) was to boot from a windows install USB (always nice to keep a windows usb and linux usb for shit like this), go into the advanced options and launch a command prompt. i needed to do it this way since the installer didnt detect any OSes and i obviously didn’t want to fresh install

then
bootrec /scanos
which will show you if it detects operating systems that aren’t in the BCD store, and if it finds what you’re looking for,
bootrec /rebuildbcd
which will give you the option of rebuilding the BCD with that OS.

oddly it still doesn’t show up as a UEFI boot in my bios, but honestly, whatever. it boots consistently and everything seems to work right.