Windows only in a VM.
That is the only way.
I dual boot grub+linux from a wholly separate drive set as the boot drive, windows boot loader is unused, untouched, isolated on the windows drive.
Windows update still broke grub.
Pull my hair out for a few hours trying to find a fix, about to try something but have to reboot one last time.
Everything is fine, back to normal.
same thing happened to me years ago. it was at that point I made the decision to never dual boot.
I have two dedicated windows devices, and the rest are Linux.
I did,for a time, dual boot by installing windows on an external m.2 drive over TB3 and had a grub entry in for it. I never updated windows and frankly only used it about once a month for work related bs.
Windows is the virus
Just stop dual booting. This is self-inflicted harm. Setup a VM or find a native workaround.
I’ve been dualbooting for over a year now. Made sure each system has its own separate drive. I’ve noticed that every time I had to reinstall Linux, my windows boot entry is gone and then I can’t access it no matter what I tried. Turned out installing Linux first then windows was my mistake. When installing windows while there is a Linux install, windows will see the EFI partition already there and just decides to share it, and doesn’t create its own.
I found that out by accident while I was in windows’ storage management. There was no efi partition. Took a whole day to find out how to create one on the same drive where windows is installed and removing the one it created on the Linux partition. It was so painful.
Bottomline, install windows first if you want to dualboot. After that, even if windows takes over the boot after an update, all it does is resets the boot sequence and makes it default to it. You’d just need to access the bios and reset the sequence to prioritize Linux. That’s it
When installing windows while there is a Linux install, windows will see the EFI partition already there and just decides to share it, and doesn’t create its own.
That’s what it’s supposed to do, it’s a plain FAT32 partition, the bootloaders are just files you put in there.
Part of the issue is that while a well-made motherboard will look for all bootloaders on the partition and present them as options in the firmware UI, bad ones will only look for a specific file (
\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI) and use that. For an OS to have a chance of booting on those boards it has to overwrite that file, blowing away whatever other bootloader was there before.It’s annoying, since Windows is mostly well behaved here (It puts the main copy of the bootloader at
\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efiand Linux bootloaders can see that and offer it, the reverse isn’t true) and can co-exist with Linux well (Well…), but manufacturers cutting corners causes more problems for everybody.Wow, damn. I didn’t know the motherboard can have a hand in this. Stupid gigabyte then. I hope this time, windows stays in its lane if I ever had to reinstall Linux. Thank you for the explanation, btw. Much appreciated
I’d double check, if you haven’t picked an option specifically it might just default to the fallback (i.e. BOOTX64) It’ll be under the boot device order section.
(Not my picture, stole it from Reddit)Here it’s listing all the possible boot options this mobo can find, but there’s a generic “UEFI OS” option which I’d bet is the fallback. And once a choice is made it’s kept unless something resets it, so if it just happened to be set to the fallback once it’ll stick with that until a change is forced.
There WAS something weird that had a UEFI word in it, but choosing it shows nothing. I’d go over all the menu choices I see one by one and none of them takes me to windows. It was very annoying, all good now since I separated them. Next time this happens I’ll just ask on the Linux community. Hopefully you’ll pop up there and help. 😅
Ahhh, so that’s why I’ve never had any issues with my linux first windows 10 second setup.
The
\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFIis the only file the UEFI standard says it is required automatically lookup from an EFI system partition. There can many EFI partitions but the UEFI is only required to find a single file per such a partition.efibootmgr -ucan show all bios auto created boot entries (don’t touch those, the bios can/will reset them at whim) and the manually created entries that don’t launch a BOOTX64.EFI named file.
I have genuinely never had this issue while dual booting and I’m very confused as to why
Maybe I’m fucking cursed. I did absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Installed Linux on a drive. Installed windows on another. Set the boot sequence in the BIOS to Linux. Installed osprober and ran it. The only different thing I have is the windows iso I use is stripped down using Chris Titus’ windows debloat script, and that one shouldn’t mess with anything as far as I know. It only debloats windows.
Tbh I think I’m just lucky because this seems like a really common issue
Don’t jynx it. Lmao
oh good to hear. I heard about windows doing jank stuff on update recently and was really worried I’d have to fight with it soon.
sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t. Different updates will break different things for different machines. Some people are blessed by Bill Gates himself, and never have to re-fix their shit. Others are cursed and have to fix random shit unrelated to the update every fucking update.
I can’t prove it, but I think microsoft does this on purpose so that some people will enthusiastically share their positive experiences with windows while everyone else gets shat on.
As long as you do what I mentioned in my comment, you’ll mostly be fine. Worst thing that could happen is a windows feature update resetting the boot sequence to itself only. It’s been a breeze.
I know this one weird trick to avoid this…
I actually had a Linux update do this once when it updated grub. Took a bit to fix but nothing was lost.
Easily solved. Just run mkfs_ext4 on the windows partition, and mount it as an additional filesystem.
My windows ssd died about 2 weeks ago, but I was dual booting.
Took out the windows drive, slapped in a new one and I was no longer getting failed smart checks.
Happy to say that the windows drive that died was replaced with a new 990… that’ll be more storage for my Fedora Plasma system instead of getting windows 10 reinstalled. Win 11 was never a consideration but I did want to keep 10 around for as long as I could.
c’est la vie
I literally had the same thing happen to me last week. I’m done with windows. Hello ubuntu
I’ll do you one better. Do you know what a windows update killed on my multi boot system? It killed the windows bootloader. I’m working on a permanent solution to fixing this bootloader fudgery.
Well, one permanent solution is to permanently ditch Windows
Would mounting the drive and running windows in a virtual machine work?
Pre-UEFI they were fighting over the boot sector, sure, but now that everything is more well defined, and every OS can read the FAT32 ESP? Never seen it…
At worst the UEFI boot entry is replaced. There are some really shitty UEFI implementations out there which only want to load
\efi\microsoft\boot\bootx64.efior\efi\boot\bootx64.efi, or keep resetting you back to those.Assuming you were dumped into Windows suddenly, you can check if you have the necessary boot entries still with bcdedit and its firmware option
bcdedit /enum firmwareIf you just have a broken order you can fix it with
bcdedit /set {fwbootmgr} displayorder {<GUID>} /addfirstIf you actually need a new entry for Linux it’s a bit more annyoing, you need to copy one of the windows entries, and then modify it.
bcdedit /copy {<GUID1>} /d "Fedora" bcdedit /set {<GUID2>} path \EFI\FEDORA\SHIM.EFI bcdedit /set {fwbootmgr} displayorder {<GUID2>} /addfirstWhere GUID1 is a suitable entry from windows, and GUID2 is the one you get back from the copy command as the identifier of the new entry. Of course you will have to adjust the description and the path according to your distro and where it puts its shim, or the grub efi, depending on which you’d like to start.
Edit: Using DiskGenius might be a little more comfortable.
Never happened to me, but then again, most of the shit I see people complain windows does has never been my experience either.
Back when I dual booted, I had the most success keeping Windows on a separate drive completely. After making the Linux drive the primary boot device, GRUB would pick it up and I’d be off to the races. I now just keep a Windows VM – it’s been much easier to deal with.
Boy howdy, you best keep that BitLocker key handy, though.
I’m not following, do you need the bitlocker key when Linux is on a separate disk? is there something extra you need to keep in mind compared to just running windows?
Just when recovering a windows partition encrypted with bitlocker.
Yeah. My TPM would trip every time Linux updated my hardware firmware… which was fairly common.
I was going to dual boot, to kind of test the waters of using Linux as my primary. Then I heard there were is with Windows not wanting to play nice, so now I just run Linux.
And to be honest I don’t actually know what any of the issues are, I didn’t care enough to even search it. I just said Fuck Windows and moved on with my life.
That was probably the right move. I had multiple drives, but only one SSD at the time, and I decided to dual boot with both on that SSD. Long story short, Windows fucked it up, I spent a lot of time recovering things, but Windows was never able to be recovered (I did manage to get Linux Bootable again). I decided to grab anything important off that drive and then just turned it fully into a Linux drive, and ditched Windows completely. It’s been great since.
Windows is literally designed to break multi-boot setups. Funny enough, multibooting on a Mac was never a big problem. Microsoft has more of a reason to cooperate here and they just can’t help themselves.
My bet is it’s partially on purpose. They think they can keep you on Windows by doing this, but for me it just ensured I go 100% Linux.
I think it’s worse. It’s negligence. If their OS works, they don’t care what it does to the rest of your computer.
I think it started as negligence, but there’s no way they aren’t aware of it now and it’s willful too. At first it happened because they didn’t care, but now it happens because they like the result.
I currently dual boot like this. I’m still really new to Linux but I always wondered about this meme since I didn’t have to change my boot settings other than to boot the drive with Linux first. Now it makes sense but it had me wondering for a while there!
Setting a BIOS password stops Windows from fucking with most things in your boot partition, I’d open-mouth kiss whomever told me that tip
This info would have been so fucking useful a decade or two ago
you mean that password function actually had a use this whole time?!?
I wish I knew that 20 years ago.
I told you. Now kiss me ( ˘ ³˘)
No. It was me.
NO, I’m Sparta-Kiss!
Guess we’ve got a polycule now
Is a monogamous couple a molecule?
Always keep a backup of your boot partition, when dual booting with windows. I wouldn’t encourage a windows boot though
Or never let Windows touch anything. There are alternatives. Treat Windows like the virus it is.
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“Hello, my name is [redacted] and I’m a recovering dualboot user. It’s been…wow, yeah, I’m 27 days sober using only Linux on my machine…You know, it’s like they tell you, you think you’ll never stop. You think “How could I stop drinking this Win11 slop? My whole life has been like this!” Naw, man. When they tell you that you don’t miss the taste, that it will come to disgust you, looking back. They’re right. They were all right all alo-” insert meloncolic sobbing for 92 minutes
“Excuse me…sir? This is a Wendy’s.”
It’s funny because it’s true.
The best way to quit Windows is cold-turkey.
Fucking goddamn I’d love to have a replacement to fusion 360 so I never had to touch windows again. FreeCAD is just awful, I keep coming back to it and keeping finding new issues with it. OpenSCAD is cool and useful for simple stuff, but it is not performant in the slightest and the lack of ability to fillet or chamfer edges is insane. Blender is great for 3d modeling but doesn’t work well for engineering modeling.
If you dont want to run a vm you could still try installing what you need with Wine or Lutris, etc. One day we will have great software for all niches but youre right we aint there yet lol
Fusion doesn’t work well with these and has only gotten worse over time.
There are some install scripts on github, but the end result is buggy to the point of being unusable.Really unfortunate because there is no free/affordable* alternative to Fusion without large caveats.
I wasn’t able to get those scripts working at all
Onshape seems to be a good CAD program that runs in the browser
Worth a try. Highly capable. It’s my default.
Ooooo, somehow haven’t heard of it! Looks really good, thanks!
These are the moments you live for.
Hell yeah. FreeCAD is awful. I use NX for work, and will do my personal stuff on there as well. It’s all just for me, I dont sell anything. But I would still love to use my own PC for it. FreeCAD is absolutely unusable.
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??? I run fedora
Presumptuous much? Why do you have to be so hostile
I have dual boot for long time already. Win 11 + Ubuntu. Although there was no any critical issues so far, except some mess up with internet connection on my ubuntu few times.
Any advice for a Steam Deck user that dual boots windows to access games I’ve paid for but otherwise can’t play anymore on Steam Deck?
Surprised no one answered yet… I don’t have a steam deck, so I don’t know much about it. Are those games from the windows store? If not, you could try to get them working on linux with Lutris (or something similar). Generally I wouldn’t encourage buying DRM-free versions of games if possible (I know sadly that’s not an option for every game)
