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.
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.
Yeah, that is really sad. I’m actually due for a new laptop soon, I’m just very thankful that Framework exists now.
That pissed me off
Had something similar happen to me. Something unrelated to the OS or hard drive and they reformatted my drive and I lost everything. I was ballistic when I found that one out.
That’s the way to go
Depending on your configuration, you can pass a gpu to your Windows VM so you don’t even lose any performance if you use Windows for gaming. All you need is an iGPU and a few extra cores/ram to handle the host overhead.
Get a separate disk for windows and you can set up your windows VM to also optionally dual boot into it
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.
I do remember like, back in the day, having a LiveDVD around that had all sorts of ‘recovery tools’, among them one that was a one-click “grub is breaked, pls fix” thing.
Only had to use it once or twice though.
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
With EFI systems this doesn’t matter. It was an issue with the legacy BIOS bootloader systems about a decade ago though.
I don’t remember if Windows updates would cause it but installing Windows second definitely would. Likewise, I think upgrading (from say Windows 7 to 10) might. Basically Windows is just like “this MBR? It’s actually mine, thanks.” With no option to not erase it.
EFI systems don’t use the MBR. Windows will default to using the whole disk if you don’t use the “advanced” button, but so will most linux distro installers.
I’m talking about BIOS, yeah, sorry if it was unclear. My 2009 CPU is still hanging on. Barely.
2009 usually means you could indeed run it without an MBR: GPT format plus a very small (2MB) partition flagged to take over the functionality of containing a bootloader normally embedded in the MBR.
Correct. But Windows is not changing the BIOS boot order. It will however change your EFI to make itself the default boot again, even if you configured it to use a separate ESP on a completely separate disk and the boot menu residing there. That’s by design as you can access your efi settings from a running system via software, while your chances to change your BIOS settings from outside the BIOS are slim to non-existent.
Also every BIOS not decades old can indead run with a hybrid setup of GPT formated disk with a small partiton to replace the MBR functionality.
In fact old BIOS systems are more resilient. With a separate bootload on another disk, starting from that disk and then chainloading Windows (on another disk) or Linux works very stable as Windows is not trying to change the boot order of BIOS.
But Windows likes to also meddle with UEFI. Even with separate disks each with their own ESP it likes to change you EFI settings to make windows the default again instead of the boot menu on another disk (everything on the same single ESP is even worse, because then Windows can access and delete everything now Windows and you have to restore the boot loader/menu).
Pretty sure it happened to me on UEFI as well
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.
Considering the people who seem to have issues are the ones who go out of their way to be all “Linux good/Microsoft bad” I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume most of it is total bullshit.
I’ve built half a dozen PC’s running windows 10 from scratch and not a single one of them has gotten messed up during the incredibly straightforward install/update process. It’s so dumb simple compared to virtually anything else I just don’t get how you could even have problems.
Listening to Windows problems on here from Linux users (I use both btw just to avoid the inevitable pedantry) is like watching a toddler throw a fit because he found out you have to peel a banana before you eat it, but their favorite fruit is an orange.
Considering the people who seem to have issues are the ones who go out of their way to be all “Linux good/Microsoft bad” I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume most of it is total bullshit.
Considering a simple google search of these terms brings up multiple people whose position on Linux and Microsoft is completely unknown to anyone else but themselves, having the exact problem OP is posting about, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and assume you’ve attached your identity to Microsoft and have to defend them for some reason.
I’ve been using Computers for nearly 30 years, and Windows has come a LONG way in that time. But lets not pretend windows doesn’t shit the bed sometimes. Hell a simple google search will reveal articles like this one and a large number of results of peoples PC’s having issues after windows update. Youtubers have made videos on windows update issues.
I had one of my PC’s straight up boot loop after a routine windows update and had to use a recovery to fix it, only for windows to auto update and re boot loop itself immediately afterwards. Most of the time, windows updates are fine, but sometimes they fuck shit up.
is like watching a toddler throw a fit because he found out you have to peel a banana before you eat it, but their favorite fruit is an orange.
Got to admit, that’s one hell of a response. Can be used in many situations.
See your argument might hold water if “stuff people talk about” were something applicable only to Windows/Linux fights. (Windows can lick my fuzzy horse ass, btw—)
But like. People love to meme on how SystemD makes your computer hang up for a long while when shutting down? Never saw it happen. People meme on PulseAudio breaking? Never happened to me. Shit like that.
Same. Never happened to me either. But I usually make a sperate UEFI partition for Linux instead of relying on grub.
It can still happen. Your UEFI settings are accessible from the system. That’s part of the standard. So Windows sometimes rewrites these settings to make itself the default again.
That is true for me now, but for years I used dual boot on old BIOS based systems so idk /shrug
That’s actually more safe. Windows can rewrite the UEFI setting to make itself the default again (although that’s of course easy to fix). But it can’t change your BIOS boot order.
It never did so in updates for me, but assuming it did, UEFI stuff is fixable, just mess with the settings for five seconds :P
When I booted into Windows 8.1 on my 2016 desktop computer, it immediately destroyed my boot loader for Ubuntu making it impossible to boot. I can’t confirm if it was BIOS or UEFI though. I had to use a convoluted technique to restore the boot loader for it to load Ubuntu afterwards each time I ran Windows.
Neither happened to me. It only happens if you install windows, not when you’re upgrading it…
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Nope. you’re an unsympathetic “how nice for you” asshole talking over people who need to be heard to get the help they need. Don’t be that person.
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.
Noooo, not the heckin windorinos, s-stop bullying the multibillion dollar company g-guys ;-;
Inventing FUD is a bad look regardless of if you’re punching up or punching down. It’s not about who the target is. It’s that FUD is inherently dishonest, and being dishonest reflects poorly on your character.
The Linux community should try to be better than that. We shouldn’t stoop to Microsoft’s old level.
Admittedly, I haven’t set up a dual booted Linux machine in about a decade, so I don’t know if it’s gotten dramatically worse.
Someone having money isn’t an excuse to not call out poor behavior against them. Making nonsensical posts that are not even accurate from an IT perspective helps no one. At best, it’s just lies to get fake internet attention, at worst, it exposes a lack of understanding of the technology.
Lol didn’t read
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Not everyone here is a Lemmy user. I just don’t like people making idiotic comments. There’s plenty do criticize about Windows without having to make stuff up due to lack of IT knowledge. If you claim calling out someone’s incorrect IT knowledge as a defending Windows, that’s just you being an idiot and knowing nothing of IT.
It’s amazing, bro that you expose your woefully inadequate knowledge. If you want to troll, don’t pretend to be anything else.
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It doesn’t though. At best, it messes with the boot record (which has been mentioned) which isn’t deleting a partition. Windows can’t delete a partition it doesn’t actually use.
You can continue your inability to understand the actual details of what you’re talking about. I’m not defending Windows. I’m defending telling the truth about PCs. You can continue your fanboyism and inexperience with operating systems and hard drives.
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Are your comprehension skills that of a four year old?
Windows users are lolcows bro, just farm them for lulz.
Did we just collectively travel 15 years back in time?
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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Calling someone out on their bullshit can do that to a person.
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
As in tradition - mindset. Getting on Linux requires a certain mindset, and this gets more and more true the weirder and more involved whatever it is that you are planning to do gets.
The best way to learn how it works is to mess with it. I have reinstalled my Surface Go 2 numerous times because I messed something up. After leaving Windows I have used dual boot with Arch and Chrome OS for a while, and now I just use Arch including secureboot enabled.
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I’m sure it varies a lot, but you should be able to enter bios setup and add a boot option. There may be a file browser type popup and you can add the known file as a boot option. Right now it may be looking for the old file location on the current windows boot option you have.
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”Windows: “Let me repair Linux for you”
Ew, you’ve got a linux on your windshield, lemme just hit the wipers for you real quick
Have you tried first resizing the windows partition inside windows? That’s what I did and my dual boot has stayed intact
Yep, that’s what I did later and it worked.
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.
Funny, cause most I hear do not have this problem.
Sounds like a skill issue.
Not so easy to do when your laptop only has space for one
Don’t most laptops also have at least 1 M.2 slot in addition to SATA bay? I know it’s supposed to be for Wifi but you can use a USB wifi dongle (you could even wire it up internally if you wanted to) while still having an NGFF SSD for Linux and having Windows on the SATA bay (or vice versa, whichever you prefer).
I would think a lot of laptops would have a way to add storage, just not necessarily SATA. My 3 year old laptop has 2 M.2 ports and no SATA.
The person was pointing out that some laptops only have a single SATA bay or M.2 slot for SSD, I was pointing out that if it doesn’t have a second dedicated SSD slot one might be able to use the Wifi Card slot for a second SSD. Though most laptops I’ve seen with M.2 usually have two of them on the board in addition to the Wifi slot.
Most new ones don’t these days. Especially high end thin and lights like mine
Well in that case it would be two M.2 slots, unless the laptop was without a servicable Wifi card it should have at least two, one for the SSD and one for Wifi. You do sacrifice built-in Wifi by using it for a small SSD but like I said you can get Wifi Dongles to gain the functionality back, even small flush ones the size of a mouse dongle.
Its so much easier too, i didnt even have to configure grub or anything it automatically detected the windows drive.
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When my dad died he left behind a handful of laptops and computers around the house, all running Linux.
My mother has to call me for help with setting up her TV, she wasn’t about to learn Linux. I managed to get any critical files off and we installed Windows. For all of it’s faults, it’s certainly a hell of a lot easier to use.
When I had a computer dual booting Windows and Linux, I maybe booted up Linux three or four times over the years I had it. It honestly just created a headache when that machine crapped out because half the files I wanted were damn near impossible to recover. Those on the Linux side. Now you could say if I had installed Linux and tried to recover them it would have been no problem and you would have been right, but running Linux is a headache in and of itself. I can acknowledge that it’s a better operating system, but not from a usability or access to software standpoint. Even if both of those areas are improving, windows still wins in both.
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Counterpoint. I used to get constant tech support calls from both of my parents until i switched them both to Linux. Now if i get a call from either of them more than twice a year it’s an oddity, and that is usually to install new hardware like a printer which they couldn’t install on windows either.
How often are their systems updated? How often are you remoting in and solving a problem before it arises?
“I don’t want to learn something new, therefore Windows is better.”
Wouldn’t that have been easier to type than all that filler?
Dual booting < having two separate SSD’s
They still need to share an EFI partition
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.
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White text on a black background reading
'Me: *Dual booting windows and linux.
'Windows: *Updates itself.
'Me: Where is the linux partition?
‘Windows:’
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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.
How can I do that? I’m dual booting but was not aware of this, makes me a little nervous…
No need to worry, it’s in your BIOS under security section. You can check if you set correct one by trying to change boot device: if there’s password prompt, you’re now safe from windows update “repair”.
All right I’ll do that, thanks!
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.
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.
Have had Windows remove my Grub entry plenty of times but have also had Windows “repair” partitions after a failed update which will nuke your Linux install.
actually this has happened to me where windows fucked with the file system of both my ext4 Linux OS partition and shared ntfs data partition. A reformat and repartition was the only remedy, so reinstall of the OS and recovery from a backup of the data were required
doesn’t seem legal
I wouldn’t agree here. Even if Windows does do this (which I doubt), there’s no way to prove it isn’t a bug. And there’s no way anyone’s going to sue Microsoft over a bug. Not only is that a gross overreaction, it’s financial suicide.
If you don’t trust Windows, don’t use it. Or if you have to, use it on a separate system/drive.
Don’t need proof that it isn’t a bug, it’s happened to me multiple times since Windows xp, all the way until the last time I tried dual booting with windows 7…
At that time, I decided if a game doesn’t work in Linux, I don’t need it. Luckily dxvk and proton came around that time
I don’t care if it’s a bug or if it’s intentional. Fuck off windows
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.
Windows couldn’t even use its own system image to restore my system when a botched Windows update messed everything up. I still don’t know what was wrong but I think it did something like try to apply them as GPT instead of MBR on my BIOS system.
Fixed or not this is good to know. I use a separate device for RAID storage and I think I’ll keep it that way. Sorry you had to deal with that. I know if my main storage got wiped by windows installer my reaction would probably make national news.
Will proceed with caution and saved drive images!
Not with EFI boot. If you deliberately use legacy BIOS emulation to boot, it can. So don’t do that.
This happens with most Linux installs particularly with Windows 11, but you can still boot to Linux from your BIOS. Interestingly enough, the only Linux distro where this has not happened is Fedora, which also doesn’t fuck the system clock up to make the Windows clock wrong. Fedora seems to be doing everything right these days.
How’d you install Windows 11 on BIOS? I thought it “required” features unique to EFI?
“required” in quote is the correct way to write it. Windows actually requires shit. It will block you from upgrading because of irrelevant requirements but then let’s you install it normally. And in best Microsoft tradition more expensive versions of Windows will let you ignore more of the meaningless requirements. (Just like the basic version will nowadays require a MS account and being online to install, while other versions don’t.)
BIOS meaning the EFI boot menu. It’s a generic term that we refuse to let die just because EFI has taken over.
If you find that already illegal… there are vendors signing their own drivers with the pre-installed Microsoft Secure Boot keys. So trying to remove them and replace them with proper ones bricks your system.
That’s awful. Not new, but i guess it’s becoming more common.
I was forced to abandon Linux on desktop in 2007. This year on a whim I got back a couple AIOs I had gifted and installed KDE neon and was blown away at how nice it was. And absurdly fast at that.
My main still has to run win for not just games but also Visio. What really gets me is the tools platform i need for work will only run on win despite it being essentially java based. If allowed to run on native Linux I can’t help but think it would be much much faster.
I’m currently testing out a portable base win10VM for those softwares. Not an ideal solution but it’s working.
I guess while I’m at it I’ll go ahead and ask… is there any OSS alternative to Visio?
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
Depends on the Distro as some use different boot configs but I had it happen with Pop!OS and did the most logical thing which was wipe my windows partition 🤜🤛
Was that on a system 76 computer? Because it would be fuckin hilarious if they were doing the same scummy shit Microsoft does.
The good old Microsoft way
Embrace Extend Extinguish
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.
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.
