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.
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.
I haven't had to use any exam software recently, but in the past when I did I remember reading that it can detect when the host is virtual and will not run in a VM. Fortunately at the time I still had a windows laptop lying around, but I'd have a real problem if one of a courses now tried to do this.
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.
Nah, you just need to develop a custom EFI app to boot on it. This app then calls a server on your network which will answer whether to boot on Linux or Windows (or any OS installed really).
And voilà, you don't need to manually select the OS anymore (well, you still need to say to the server what to use, but you can do it beforehand, not during the boot)
I just use rEFInd with auto discover turned on. I installed the windows bootloader onto my Linux boot partition and haven't had any issues with Windows overwriting my boot entries on update.
I'm using EFISTUB instead of a boot loader (on the PC running Arch, anyway) and Windows hasn't figured out how to break that, yet.
Somehow it hasn't figured out how to ruin my systemd-boot bootloader on EFI, (NixOS, this time) either. Perhaps it just has better support for EFI than BIOS?
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.
