Windows eats partitions

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.

That's the way to go

I want to do this so bad but gaming always stops me. Some anticheat refuses to let you play in a vm

Defective by design. I really hate windows but need it for Ableton.

Can I boat off Linux USB and run an MBR recovery program or something?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

But this is Lemmy Linux memes where they tell lies or use half truths about other OS's and laugh about it rather than making actual clever memes! Get outta here with that sense!!

They still need to share an EFI partition

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.

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

Same. Never happened to me either. But I usually make a sperate UEFI partition for Linux instead of relying on grub.

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.

Neither happened to me. It only happens if you install windows, not when you're upgrading it...

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.

I'd argue one shouldn't even be messing with dual booting if they don't understand much about the bootloader.

Windows: "Let me repair Linux for you"

Have you tried first resizing the windows partition inside windows? That's what I did and my dual boot has stayed intact

This. I entirely understand that some people don't have that option, but it's worth reiterating that if you have a choice, you're best off not to have partitions at all.

I run Mint on an 8-year-old Mac desktop machine with no partitions and it's lightning-fast for everything I need it to do.

It's also worth mentioning that I have said desktop machine because my wife is a pro photographer and Apple and Adobe have colluded for decades to create a kind of "planned obsolescence" whereby professional photographers are ostensibly locked out of the current industry standard unless they run a very recent version of Photoshop that by design isn't compatible with hardware architecture that's more than about 5-years-old.

Not so easy to do when your laptop only has space for one

Funny, cause most I hear do not have this problem.

Sounds like a skill issue.

Its so much easier too, i didnt even have to configure grub or anything it automatically detected the windows drive.

How can I do that? I'm dual booting but was not aware of this, makes me a little nervous....

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.

Noooo, not the heckin windorinos, s-stop bullying the multibillion dollar company g-guys ;-;

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.

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.

https://superuser.com/questions/758854/mdadm-win7-install-created-a-boot-partition-on-one-of-my-raid6-drives-how-to-r#1243636

I had remembered some details wrong. I had unplugged the Linux SSD, and it wad raid 6 not 5, and it was 2TB disks.

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.

Not with EFI boot. If you deliberately use legacy BIOS emulation to boot, it can. So don't do that.

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.

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

I do it too, but the essence is not to share a drive with Windows. Just use a second drive. It's also better to select the boot drive using BIOS/UEFI.

Windows likes to mess with the EFI partition on updates, scrweing up bootloaders. That you can prevent by separate EFI partition on another disk, This way Windows doesn't see the other efi files to boot. But when it feesl really obnoxious, it also edits your EFI table and sets itself as the default. That doesn't actually damage your linux boot files, but you still need to log back with some bootstick and revert the change, to make your bootloader/menu the default again.

Was that on a system 76 computer? Because it would be fuckin hilarious if they were doing the same scummy shit Microsoft does.

Embrace Extend Extinguish

Lol which Windows? Windows 98? I installed win 10 on the laptop of my gf after replacing the hdd with an ssd some days ago and one update also froze. But it did not break the os. After rebooting it just removed the update.

I think the phrase you want is "pull the trigger". "Jump the gun" means to do something too soon, whereas "pull the trigger" means to do something after a wait.

I assume secure boot is off and your Windows drive/partition is encrypted.

Boot into Linux using a USB, and fix your boot partition from there.

Thank you kind stranger.

Go into Bios to set the default startup partition.

The reality is that most have used Windows for quite some time. They just don't have a tolerance for making excuses for Windows bugs and bullshit. That's why they changed their OS.

I can perfectly well fix any of these rare problems, often in seconds. And still I find every single one obnoxious and a valid reason to shit on Windows. Even more so as some are not actually bugs but intentional sabotage of a competing OS.

The simple fact that I need to think about measures to minimize the possibility of Windows screwing up dual-boot and also need to know how to fix it, if it happens none-the-less is rediculous. That's completely independent from technological literacy.