Windows only in a VM.
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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That is the only way.
Setting a BIOS password stops Windows from fucking with most things in your boot partition, Iβd open-mouth kiss whomever told me that tip
I told you. Now kiss me (β Β β Λβ Β β Β³β Λβ )
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?!?
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I actually had a Linux update do this once when it updated grub. Took a bit to fix but nothing was lost.
Just stop dual booting. This is self-inflicted harm. Setup a VM or find a native workaround.
Windows is the virus
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.
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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?
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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.
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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 canβt help themselves.
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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 doesnβt 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.efi and 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.
The \EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI is 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 -u can 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.
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
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Always keep a backup of your boot partition, when dual booting with windows. I wouldnβt 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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I know this one weird trick to avoid this..
Easily solved. Just run mkfs_ext4 on the windows partition, and mount it as an additional filesystem.
Literally the only boot drive issue I've ever had dual booting was when I somehow accidentally deleted the GRUB partition (I'm still not entirely sure how)
Grub lives on the drive with Linux, windows on an extra one, select which I wanna use on boot. Windows just updated like yesterday, rebooted right to GRUB no issue
User reports having lost his GRUB partition mysteriously
User says not to worry about Windows randomly removing GRUB partitions through Windows Updates
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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 990β¦ thatβll 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
What the heck is the origin of this meme template? And am I the only one who thought this was Roger Stone?
that's why i just deleted my entire hard drive and installed mint on the whole thing
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