I really hate that Windows does this. Which is why when I decide to switch a machine to Linux it's the only OS allowed to boot to bare metal. Windows can go in a VM and suck it.
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Not sure why, but your comment made me think about the first machine I switched to Linux. It was a laptop who's fan eventually had a bad bearing and needed to be replaced. Luckily it was still under warranty, so I sent the laptop in to get the fan replaced, and received my laptop back with Windows installed on it... I was so livid.
Never send them the drive.
They are probably required to boot to the desktop for qa
Yup, exactly what they said. But I didn't know any better at the time. These days I would just fix that myself rather than send it to them
Yeah, it's a once in a lifetime thing lol, but it's better to put that out on the off chance someone reading it may have to send one in.
I hate to say it, but unless they're corporate machines or you put it together yourself, computers are basically disposable these days.
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That's the way to go
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What's actually happening here is Windows is setting its bootloader first in your EFI when it gets updated. Linux isn't gone, you just have to press the "boot another drive" button and boot to it, or go into your EFI setup and switch the bootloader back to the Linux one.
Linuxes do the same thing when updating their bootloader.
Note for the Ackshually crowd: If you're still booting MBR (which comes with the partition eating risk on dual boots) you have a system that is older than Windows 8 - 11+ years old, so eating the MBR is something you'll have to deal with unconventionally, as all modern systems, OS, and hardware expect you to be using EFI.
Grub does not do the same thing unless something has gone wrong. It detects windows and offers you the choice on boot as to which OS to start.
Grub is still the first bootloader in that case. You would not notice if it was putting itself first after an update unless you have Windows booting first.
You might notice if you are booting between multiple linuxes, all with their own version of grub.
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Not the case. What's happening here is Windows is removing the ext4 partition completely, expanding the ntfs partition and writing to all of it.
Windows update did that to my <1 year old laptop. I figured it had just wiped out grub, but when it was booted from a live-usb there was no ext4 partition there at all. This has been reported many times.
Microsoft should be sued for this shit. Legal protection from destroying people's data that is not part of Windows or in a Windows partition, whether deliberately or by negligence, is not something that can be legitimately covered by a license agreement.
Second that. I can't think of a way that that is not deliberate. The "cover" would be that it is ensuring that the full device is used so that the end user doesn't have to worry about it. In reality, there's no legitimate reason for an update to touch the partition table. Way to easy to brick the system.
In my experience (W11 + Fedora on UEFI Thinkpad), I've seen it actually get rid of the Fedora entry from the UEFI boot list. Reinstalling GRUB from chroot didn't fix it, so I used EasyUEFI and manually added the Fedora EFI file to the boot list and that worked.
So it wasn't simply changing the boot order, it actually nuked Fedora from the UEFI boot list.
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It sometimes destroys the Linux boot sector too. But it's simple enough to chroot with a live usb and repair it. I don't even have both OS as an option. Mine boots straight into Linux unless I interrupt it and use the boot another drive option. Linux and Windows have their own separate boot sectors, but Windows will fubar the Linux sector randomly.
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Dual booting < having two separate SSD's
They still need to share an EFI partition
Not really if you have a bootloader like refind it will look for other EFIs and list them. Makes for a really clean set up
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If you don't want to bother with the bootloader like the other comment mentioned you can also just use the boot menu from the motherboard instead. You gotta mash f11 (or whatever it is on your motherboard) on boot when you want to go into Windows, but if you only need it every once in a while it is good enough.
Never happened to me. Like ever. And I've been on Linux (with occasional dual-booting whenever I'm in a position where I need windows--) for like 15 years now?
To be honest a lot of stuff people talk about seems to not happen to me and I think I might be exceedingly lucky or smth.
My guess: the windows update fucked up Grub. Happened to me once or twice in 20 years of dual booting. It is also easily recoverable.
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It tends to happen if you are not using the windows bootloader (GRUB for example) but if you use the windows bootloader it should be fine
Oh it just changes the bootloader? That's not a big deal. Easy to fix from any live usb.
Also, for any distro hoppers out there... Do yourself a favour and put Ventoy on a USB. You can thank me later
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Windows only updates the bootloader, it doesn't touch Linux partitions. After an update you just have to fix the bootloader again which isn't too hard if you know how it works.
I'd argue one shouldn't even be messing with dual booting if they don't understand much about the bootloader.
My counterpoint would be how does one best learn about anything if not by messing with it
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In my case it wasn't the boot entry being removed. It actually ate the partition. When installing Linux Mint, I resized the Windows partition in Linux. Then I noticed that Windows absolutely didn't recognize that change, and thought its partition is still as big as it used to. Then on a restart it hit me with the "Repairing drive C:" which killed the Linux partition leaving just something corrupted.
"Repairing"
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If you still "dual boot", be advised that Windows is a piece of shit and will almost always cause this with a "build" update. Highly, highly recommend having Linux and Windows (shame on you) on separate physical drives.
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Just protect bios/uefi with password and windows won't be able to modify any other EFI entry. It worked when i've dual-booted, it should still work.
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What about stop making bullshit posts? Windows have never did that to me, and there's no reason why would it touch any partition aside from its own and (if it exists) the Windows boot one.
That said, It MIGHT replace MBR boot record but I don't know if that's very likely these days. I remember upgrading from Windows 8 to 10 and Windows left my MBR alone, and I was able to boot to GRUB just fine.
If you install Linux first and then Windows on the same drive, it will fuck up your bootloader.
You can easily make Grub boot Windows, so just overwrite whatever fuckup Windows made, or install Windows first.
It won't happen with a simple update, though, that's for sure. Maybe if you're upgrading Windows to a new major release.
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to be fair, it actually doesn't know - windows doesn't do ext4...
But it knows there's a partition there and it's easy to know it's a Linux partition type. Microsoft just prefer to say it doesn't know the partition type and simply say it ignores it. You don't need to have support for a file system in order to check it's partition type. It's just ms bs
Whoa.. this really happens? If so that's disgusting and doesn't seem legal. I was about to setup a dual boot for my laptop which has proprietary windows only software I need for work but now I guess i need to research a bit.
I unplug physicals disks when installing windows. Learned the hard way when windows placed the boot partition on a device it could not detect the filsystem of. It destroyed my RAID disks (a little but my fault, because I messed up the recovery).
This is what Windows installer saw (going by memory, this was 8 years ago)
- SSD 500 GB (either it recognised ext4 file system, or this one was unknown)
- SSD 500 GB (Where I specified to install windows)
- 4 x HDD 8TB (unknown disks, unknown file system, Windows unaware that this was a RAID-5 software dm-raid)
What did it to? It created a new partition table and wrote data to a new boot partition it made on one of the 8TB disks, no questions asked.
So, to the people who answered you that windows installer cannot do this. Maybe they fixed it. But it certainly could, and it cetianly did. I remember very carefully going through the installer because I was concerned about this happening. I thought about unplugging them, but was lazy. Because "it would be insane for windows to write on a disk it cannot identify the file system of".
Lessons learned:
- If you plan to install windows on a disk along side Linux, install windows first, if you can. Safest bet is still to:
- If you cannot, unplug all other disks other than the one windows is intended to be on.
Edit: I found post on this way back when, but leaving what I wrote as is.
I had remembered some details wrong. I had unplugged the Linux SSD, and it wad raid 6 not 5, and it was 2TB disks.
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Whoa.. this really happens?
No, the only thing that windows might do, is reset the bootloader so it skips grub. If you're using UEFI (which you should), you can easily restore it from your bios.
I've only seen it happen on big updates, not the smaller ones.
As an Ubuntu + Win10 dual booter I had a couple of instances where Windows update destroyed things so irreparably that live Ubuntu boot-repair failed to work, and hours of back-and-forthing error messages to Ubuntu IRC and discord support channels yielded nothing. And I'm too stupid to know any other way of fixing it, so I was SOL. Your milage may vary.
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