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.
I swear at this point Windows users are collectively victims of Stockholm syndrome.
Remember kids, if you’re gonna dual boot, stay safe, use 2 drives, and pray you’re fast enough to mash the boot menu button when you power on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
6 years was “not too long ago”, eh? Right this way grandpa, let’s get you back to your rocking chair
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 ?
