I have a real simple solution that involves not windows
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.
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.
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.
- install windows
- adjust main partition so you have space for Linux
- install linux, during install create anither efi partition, and root partition.
- linux probes foreign OS (some distros might not) and creates a chainloader entry from your new EFI to Windows EFI
- set BIOS to boot from linux EFI
Windows never knows the other partition exists and leaves it intact.
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.
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.
For the rare occasion that I need Windows bare metal, I have a Windows 11 installation on a usb ssd originally installed via the Rufus Windows-To-Go option that I can just plug into the system and boot off it whenever I need it without it touching my uefi menu or partition on my internal drives. This way I can also use it on another machine if that need arises. Windows can even trim the usb drive it's running on. It pretty much works as if installed internally.
Best is when it messes up it's own bootloader at the same time lol.
This is why you don't duel boot. If Windows can't play nice with others it doesn't get to exist at all. Proton+Steam means there is never a reason to run windows at all. "But I need some non-game windows applications." K. Proton is able to reliably run games in a library of tens of thousands of games with all kinds of bad programming and obscure hardware use. It's a standard for being able to run windows apps in linux that is going to cover any other application you have.
Ugh, that's so annoying. Every time windows updates i have to open the BIOS and put ubuntu first on the boot order so it doesn't skip grub.
I Also have a drive that i can access on both linux and Windows and every so often Windows will make it inaccessible on Linux because it didn't fully unmount the drive.
Windows managed to brick itself when I booted for the first time in a month. I only wanted it for the Karafun app, but I guess I can live without it.
For me its the opposite, Linux always boots fine but occasionally a linux system update will break the Windows boot option in systemd-boot
Never trusted this setup to begin with because I didn't trust Microsoft and I'm not all that capable or want to take time to sort this stuff out on a regular basis.
So I just setup my ThinkPad laptop with two removable SSDs and I just swap one or the other whenever I need. The drive is easily switched, from power down, remove drive, insert other drive and restart only takes about two minutes.
I'm not going to risk messing up my setup because two operating systems can't work with one another.
Besides I seldom switch, I use Windows if I really have to about three or four times a year.
just leave a grub floppy in the machine and boot from there, you won't even notice.
I have three ssd and none of them boot windows. I do have a windows vm (and macos too) in virt-manager in case I need it, but I haven't boot them for about a year.
i need to remove my windows boot drive from my workstation, but it lives in a rack. And has a temperament. Sometimes when losing power shit just refuses to boot for like an hour, eventually it randomly boots. Still unsure why. Could be anything really. Best guess is bad cmos battery though. Could be slightly bunged bios, could be marginally fucky cpu. Who knows. It's fine when shutdown with power for long periods of time though.
Gotta love modern hardware, if only 7 segment displays weren't a 300 dollar privilege.
I have an old, spinning rust WinBlows, easily inserted in the ex-cdrom slot of my bathtub movie lenovo t440p, because once a year or so I need to upgrade the firmware of some crap that has no other option. Wastes about 24 hrs of (annoying but small) power updating each time. May this pass, in time. (like tears in rain :)
I should get around to imaging it onto a SSD, but I don't, due to distaste, and then I need it again. :(.
I have yet to have this happen to me lol.
I have to use Windows for work, so this is how I got it setup and MS still makes it difficult with updates lol.
i have two other possibilities at hand, that do not involve two SSDs:
- don't use intentionally broken software in the first place ;-)
- use another device for bootloader, could be a readonly CD or a usb drive, PXE/bootp could also do it.
And if your company wants you to use rotten software, they also want you to give them the delays, downtimes and annoyances that naturally come with rotten decisions, just keep that in mind.
Here is one thing to remember and why i call it rotten software and rotten decisions:
Microsoft offers a free "blame the ransomware people" to any CTO who just wants to receive money without working at all or not having to "think" during work. That same CTO can get a bonus after "solving" the ransomware issue and then: "look how 'invaluable' that CTO is to the company" he "worked" for month ( yelling at engineers he previously told to install rotten software???) and resolved the ransomware issue!! This is same to those who work. no law has ever given people that many payed breaks from work as "rotten software" vendors did. and if you made a mistake and did not get trained before, you could blame bot beeing trained.
Look at it from a "fingerpointer" point of view, one cloud always blame someone else for everything and the only one to blame is too big to fail and also untouchable due to their army of darkness lawyers. thus anything happened? no one could be guilty AND be held responsible. Also if one is slow at work, and so is his OS, obviously easy to blame someone else again.
so microsoft offers a "solution" to "boss wants you to work more and quicker" but remember, that same boss only "needs" a cover for his own ass to be able to point to someone else and the ones creating the rotten software do deliver that ;-)
i do not know any better wording for such a situation than "rotten" thus i name it so.
I have two ssds for raid1 boot,it's very nice
just wish my bios would stop making phantom uefi boot entries every boot
Secure boot Linux bootloader Kernel update
Dual boot issues like this is why I stopped using windows not in a VM.
