I have a real simple solution that involves not windows
i use a different drive for my windows installation because that happened to often,
and i swear it once managed to wipe the bootloader on the linux drive.i have no idea how it did that,
but i avoided starting windows using the grub entry since then.Having two drives is sometimes not enough, either. I have no idea why, but anytime Windows installs for the first time or goes through a major update (not the small security patches, but the periodic feature releases) there’s a random D20 dice throw to determine if it will randomly decide to create the bootloader and recovery partitions in another drive, even though your main installation isn’t there.
I kid you not, Windows 10 once decided that my external SSD enclosure was the best place to put the bootloader.
This happened to me! Did an update, unplugged my eSATA and BAM! Can’t find bootloader. I literally, physically facepalmed when I realized what happened. At least the old one still worked from the primary.
I’ve done a ton of Linux updates and this has never happened to me once (yet).
Pfft, even 2 separate ssds for dual booting doesnt stop this from happening to me -___-
On the plus side, this is the first i recall hearing of someone encountering the same issue, so i guess i dont feel as alone now.
it stopped happening to me after i stopped using the grub entry to boot windows.
i now use my mainboards boot menu to select the windows entry when i need to boot it
Windows has a lovely “feature” where it installs the bootloader on a secondary drive if there’s one connected. It doesn’t install it on drive 1 and drive 2, just drive 2. I always disconnect all secondary drives before installing windows for this very reason.
That said you can configure the windows bootloader to recognize your Linux (or grub) and just use that to manage booting two OSes and it’s less likely to not destroy things.
How can you do that?
Is that actually easily fixable? Was planning to go dual-boot soon on my laptop and haven’t even considered this scenario.
It’s relatively quick and easy to fix if you have a live boot Linux usb stick …and probably a second machine so you can Google what to do. It’s just also rather worrying at the time.
My old thinkpads have this great feature where the hard drive is easilly accessible on the side, so I leave the cover off and just swap the drive to boot into a different os
iirc the last time it happened to me, i just needed to fix the uefi entry which wasnt that bad.
(just remember to have a usb stick with a live image ready)if it were to overwrite your bootloader that would be a way harder fix.
i dont remember if the second ever happend to me
F
I swear at this point Windows users are collectively victims of Stockholm syndrome.
Yes, someone please come free us! I am being held hostage by Windows and Autodesk Inventor.
It’s the usual problem: if your employer IT refuses to budge, you get locked into a Windows (or Apple) ecosystem. I had the same. My solution was to remove myself from corporate IT, and use my own device.
I use workarounds for the interfaces with corporate:
- MS Teams Linux client (sadly discontinued as of 2022) still works out of a jail, but the browser solution is also tested and ready as backup should I be forced
- Webmail instead of a proper mail proram - that’s a big trade-off, but I can work with it, as much as it sucks
- Webex for conferencing (as it works properly with Firefox, contrary to many other solutions)
- Web portals continue to work - even though sometimes I need a user agent switcher to pretend I am using chrome (fuck you @MS Teams)
There’s mail apps for Linux. I think thunderbird is most popular.
My point was about corporate IT refusing to provide a mail server to the outside world.
So no IMAP/POP3 server or what do you mean? If so how does the web app work?
Webapp probably uses Exchange services internally and exposes only a web interface to the internet
Ah, I suppose that makes sense.
I take it webmail is due to Exchange-based mail?
The €10 I pay a year for Exquilla is worth its weight in gold. It’s about the only thing on my system that’s not FOSS, but I’m not even mad because it works. 9.5/10 would recommend.
Yes that’s due to Exchange. Thank you for the pointer to Exquilla - I’d gladly be willing to pay for that out of my own pocket, but there’s three problems:
- closed source plugin, which I don’t want on my machine if I can avoid it
- convincing my company to expose EWS (unless OWA uses the same interface, which I doubt?)
- Microsoft seems to plan decommissioning of EWS:
Quote:
Today, we are announcing that on October 1, 2026, we will start blocking EWS requests from non-Microsoft apps to Exchange Online.
Or Nvidia GPU owners because Nvidia is fine on Windows but sucks on Linux.
On windows they make you install their annoying software to do driver updates and it sends random notifications and has a bunch of ads and other things I don’t want when installing software.
I’m using kde5 on X. To my knowledge, the only issues you might have with Nvidia on Linux is if you want to use Wayland instead of X. Unless you are someone who refuses to use non-free drivers for philosophical reasons, but then you wouldn’t be using Windows.
I’ve been running an Nvidia GPU for over 6 years now on Linux without issues.
I even am using a fairly recent 4070ti and was able to use it with proprietary drivers soon after launch and was running cyberpunk 2077 at 4k with high settings and ray tracing with an average 60fps with dsr.
I also use the cuda cores for running open source llms locally and have no issues there either.
using XWayland loads games fine for me in Wayland :)
the only issues you might have with Nvidia on Linux is if you want to use Wayland instead of X
So present-day technology instead of legacy crap.
Nothing wrong with using present-day technology as software if you want to use present-day graphics cards, is there?
Ummm…you think windows isn’t legacy?
Hot take, windows isn’t that bad (privacy issues aside).
It actually is worse than “that bad”. Windows 2000 wasn’t “that bad” - everything after that has gone downhill.
Objective reasons why Windows is extremely shitty:
- with every new Windows version, the same settings are shuffled around and users have to re-learn the interfaces to find stuff they had been able to easily find before
- bloatware
- tons of software is shoved down your throat with opt-out options either not available, or you have to jump through literal hoops to get there
It’s always funny to me when people defend something by saying that it’s “not that bad”, because that still acknowledges that it is bad.
I mean I can take up issues with Linux as well. The driver support can be iffy at times, especially with Nvidia, gaming can be a challenge, depending on what game you’re playing.
“Not that bad” is a phrase, which acknowledges issues but still contests something to be bad beyond acceptance.
Oh please, half the time on most computers after installing stock Windows you’ll need to install the NIC drivers from a USB stick because you can’t download drivers locally without a NIC. With Linux, it pretty works out the gate. Significant driver issues haven’t been a real issue with Linux in about a decade.
Nvidia drivers are especially weird to use as an example. Since the advent of AI, Nvidia Linux support has vastly improved since most AI use cases require Linux. It’s enterprise-ready at this point.
As for the games that don’t work well - the binaries were only built for Windows, so Linux has to jump through hoops to run them. That’s not Linux’s fault, it’s the fault of the game developers. Thanks to the FOSS community those hoops are only getting easier to jump through. Most of the games that don’t work at all depend on some sort of horrific anti-cheat rootkit that any tech literate person should consider a dealbreaker even if they use Windows as a daily driver.
And the games that do work, which is most of the games on Steam at this point, perform better on Linux than Windows on the same hardware because they don’t have to deal with the bloat of a Windows OS.
I guess if you can accept ads crammed into every nook and cranny of the OS, constantly fighting with Edge over your choice of browser, reduced battery life and system performace due to OS bloat, having every single aspect of your computing experience built around corporate profits rather than user experience, and buying a computer every few years because of planned obsolescence you could settle with a bad OS like Windows.
I always say, an OS is a tool, not a religion. I use Linux at home 98% of the time because it fits what I need to do and it’s snappier than Windows on my hardware and gives me more control, or maybe I know better how to do certain things in Linux nowadays that I’ve left Windows mostly behind. I use Windows at work because that’s what dictated, and also because MS Visio is only on Windows (I could use MacOS with Omnigraffle, but Macs are not available at my pay grade. Whatever). They pay me to work and be productive, and this means using Outlook/Teams, AD SSO integration with Edge, all the VPNs/network control/DLP agents. And luckily now I can use Linux subsystem in Windows, so I can work on the cli when I need to do something fancy. They don’t pay me to spend hours trying to find a way to work with their systems other than what’s supported.
On the topic at hand (bootloader issues). Never had a problem personally, but Iast time I did proper dual booting (on the same drive) was with Windows8.1. Now I have different drives, with the bios configured to boot from the drive with Linux. If I want to boot on Windows 10 I actually have to change the boot sequence. And even then there is grub (from an old dual boot setup).
Picture this: you buy a car. You buy a new set of wheels/rims and a new radio system with Android and whatever. You also put some new carpets on the floor of the car. Now you need to take it for a simple routine maintenance and checkup at the car brand official shop. After a few hours you go back there to pick you car up and it has the stock wheels, stock radio, stock carpets and everything and you ask where the hell is your stuff and ALL of them on the shop look at you confused like if they never seen any different accessory on that car before other than the stock ones, or don’t know what you are talking about. All they know is that the car is now “according to spec”.
This is what it feels like after updating Windows with Linux in dual-boot on the same drive.
Do you happen to know where it’s from?
Zombieland Saga.
Zombie girls are brought together to make an idol group by a sadistic madman who abuses the shit out of them.
Edit, the scene in question
I remember seeing the intro back when it came out. I wonder if I would like it. This kind of humor does make it seem good.
Sounds appropriate…
It’s at least gotten a bit better.
There was a time when Photoshop and other programs used a copy-protection scheme that overwrote parts of grub, causing the user not to be able to boot Linux or Windows.
They knew about it, and just DGAF. I don’t remember their exact FAQ response, but it was something along the lines of “Photoshop is incompatible with GRUB. Don’t dual boot if you use Photoshop.”
Grub still has code for BIOS based installs that uses reed-solomon error correction at boot time to allow grub to continue to function even if parts of its core.img were clobbered by shitty copy protection schemes for Windows software.
I have power switches for my drives. If I want to boot into windows, I turn that one on and the others off.
how do you do that ? physical switches ? do you buy them separately and solder them ? where ?
It’s a physical switch board like this
https://www.amazon.com/Kingwin-Optimized-Controls-Provide-Longevity/dp/B00TZR3E70
Neat, had no idea this existed. Thanks !
Hear me out: Class action lawsuit
Heard you and that wouldn’t fly. Just like you’re not supposed to run Windows on mission critical systems like nuclear reactors (seriously, check the EULA), running multiple operating systems side by side is most likely out of a supported configuration and “use at your own risk”. You’d have zero standing or less for any sort of lawsuit.
But just because it is in the EULA doesn’t make it legal. At a time where big tech is being kept under a microscope for antitrust regulation, I’d say that an OS that actively destroys other competing OSes on the machine it is installed on should be considered an unfair anti-competitor tactic.
Idk why you think they have to support this. It’d be one thing if it was malicious but I really doubt it is.
Might not hold up legally, but it’s still insane that the single largest vendor of operating systems cant figure out how to install a bootloader with playing russian roulette.
It’s malicious.
With UEFI it’s waaayyyy less bad than it used to be. There is no more MBR in the traditional sense for windows to clobber. Windows and Linux can share an UEFI boot partition both dropping in their appropriate boot binaries.
Even if you install Linux and Windows on separate devices, unless you do something strange they will share the same UEFI boot partition.
Personally, I do 2 separate UEFI boot partitions. Grub is the default which can select the windows boot partition. Then Windows can do whatever it wants to it’s own boot partition.
Man, when I first messed around with Linux I hosed the MBR more times than I can remember. Either through Windows smashing it with an update, or my dumb ass doing stupid shit in gparted.
Pretty sure I was able to recover the important files somehow, but my parents banished me to the old family desktop for that pretty quick.
Me too. Lol. It was almost a right of passage for people at the time.
- install windows
- adjust main partition so you have space for Linux
- install linux, during install create anither efi partition, and root partition.
- linux probes foreign OS (some distros might not) and creates a chainloader entry from your new EFI to Windows EFI
- set BIOS to boot from linux EFI
Windows never knows the other partition exists and leaves it intact.
Could you give me more detail for step 3?
Don’t even have to do that. Install windows first, then install Linux with refind bootloader on preferably a separate disk. Done
Did exactly that.
I installed arch so that didn’t happen.
Not how it works
You do need a separate EFI, even though linux finds EFI, otherwise windows update trashes it randomly and why the meme we see here exists, with separate EFI windows doesn’t know about it. You can shutdown windows mid update and boot linux, then reboot back to windows and update will continue. Siloed System
That’s literally what I did yesterday with my method. It works, Windows has never trashed it
It will, thats why that meme exists.
Not during typically reboots, but when some windows update or autofile repair happens it thinks it is the only OS on that partition and does what it likes.
Nope, ran it like this for over 5 years. Definitely rebooted during updates / did some crap
Then you have been lucky, because most peoples experience with grub EFI on Windows partition is windows will eventually scrub it.
Yes. When you install Linux it will auto detect the Windows EFI partition and put boot stuff there by default, but then windows comes along and will randomly trash that setup. So during install don’t go with the suggested option, instead use the partitioning tool to creat another small EFI boot partition elswhere on disk, leaving Windows EFI and OS paetitions as is. Also create your root and home partition(s). Install to those partitions, then Linux should prompt for Probe Foreign OS and add a chainloader entry to your grub menu. This entry, when selected, points grub to windows EFI partition ID and hands off the boot process to Windows. Windows is unaware it has been chainloaded. As long as you set BIOS to load directly from the LINUX EFI entry then you will boot to Grub with Linux/Windows Dual option…But technically it is not a true Dual Boot, it is a sequential boot I guess. I have had this for 7 years on same install and boot between W10 and Linux daily. Windows has never touched my Linux EFI.
How to add chainloader entry to grub?
I responded how to via another comment, but wanted to mention that you may have a chainload to Windows already with your dual boot, but the main point was using two EFI partitions and chainloading to the other one, so Windows isn’t ever in charge of files in your linux boot partition
For something like OpenSUSE you go into YAST2-GUI and click the probe foreign OS and then it asks you if you want Windows or Linux as the default boot. But to do it manually you add a menu entry to /boot/grub2/custom.cfg. or in /etc/grub.d/40_custom. After editing this you will have to run grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg which will compile all the grub info into /etc/grub2/grub.cfg I believe the custom.cfg entries end up after the 40_custom entries that the OS may have included. There is a persistent method entry if you did want to edit the /etc/grub2/grub.cfg directly, but probably not advised.
Here is my entry for Windows boot partition and location of MS boot. Also below that is a UEFI entry for geting back to the BIOS, not relevent to this topic, but just so you see how the menu entries are defined. In my system these are at the end of all the other Linux entries.
### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### menuentry 'Windows Boot Manager (on /dev/nvme0n1p2)' --class windows --class os $menuentry_id_option 'osprober-efi-4E48-193F' { insmod part_gpt insmod fat search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 4E48-193F chainloader /efi/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi } ### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_uefi-firmware ### menuentry 'UEFI Firmware Settings' $menuentry_id_option 'uefi-firmware' { fwsetup }
Two ssds is when you need to run stuff on windows that requires the bare metal.
Windows needs to be contained, controlled and told who is the boss, I suggest using Tiny11 or MicroXP in a VM for stuff that can’t run in wine.
MicroXP!? What year is it!?
Firefox stopped supporting XP in 2018 so it’s not too long ago that it was still usable.
ok so technically, the 2018 support was post wannacry? I want to say. I dont believe they totally supported it up until quite a few years prior to that.
I was struggling to find the newest XP related news to prove my point, it was the best I could do.
By 2018 XP had been replaced by Windows 7 for several years.
yeah. Win 7 was released in like 2009? Win 10 was 2015.
Win xp was probably discontinued the same time as win 7.
Micro xp… I got that to run on a Intel 400mhz laptop with 32mb of mainboard soldered sdram chips. Nothing like a a operating system under 200mb installed with a GUI.
If I dual boot windows, I tend to disconnect my Linux drive any time I do anything on the Windows side. Even installing Windows fresh using default settings, it managed to completely erase my Linux disk to put the Windows bootloader on it even though I selected a completely different disk for the Windows OS. Won’t be making that mistake again. And by mistake I mean dual booting Windows. That pile of spaghetti code gets a VM.
windows installing its bootloader on a completely separate drive is such a weird and fucking idiotic issue for it to have.
I got used to windows overwriting the MBR and could generally work around that. But the last time I tried windows/Linux dual boot, it was windows that got caught in a recovery loop after a windows update. Linux was fine. I was impressed at how thoroughly Windows had killed itself on a basic unmolested install. At that point I decided I was done with windows on bare metal unless it was the only thing running. Windows goes in the virtual sandbox or plays by itself.
Windows actually works better in a vm on Linux than on bare metal. And it’s got a much smaller chance of breaking my PC that way too.
Linux actually works better inside WSL in Windows.
Nooooooo!!!
🤮
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Linux running inside WSL on Windows is the only thing that makes Windows usable.
Linux running inside WSL on Windows is the only thing that makes Linux usable.
FIFY
For the rare occasion that I need Windows bare metal, I have a Windows 11 installation on a usb ssd originally installed via the Rufus Windows-To-Go option that I can just plug into the system and boot off it whenever I need it without it touching my uefi menu or partition on my internal drives. This way I can also use it on another machine if that need arises. Windows can even trim the usb drive it’s running on. It pretty much works as if installed internally.
