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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 ;-;

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.

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

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.

That's the reason people often switch to Windows only as a VM (there are even solution to passthrough a dedicated graphics card just for Windows, if that's for gaming) after some time. Because Windows is actively working against other OS's on your computer.

In a way their Secure Boot bullshit is nothing different. Get vendors to include MS keys by default, then pretend that Windows is somehow more secure because you need to deactivate Secure Boot to install soemthing else (who cares that one key on every machine is not exactly secure, even more so as MS keys were already found in the wild in malware so they don't even know how to not lose them...)

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

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

Windows: "Let me repair Linux for you"

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

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.