iirc the last time it happened to me, i just needed to fix the uefi entry which wasnt that bad.
(just remember to have a usb stick with a live image ready)
if it were to overwrite your bootloader that would be a way harder fix.
My old thinkpads have this great feature where the hard drive is easilly accessible on the side, so I leave the cover off and just swap the drive to boot into a different os
It's relatively quick and easy to fix if you have a live boot Linux usb stick ...and probably a second machine so you can Google what to do. It's just also rather worrying at the time.
Windows has a lovely “feature” where it installs the bootloader on a secondary drive if there’s one connected. It doesn’t install it on drive 1 and drive 2, just drive 2. I always disconnect all secondary drives before installing windows for this very reason.
That said you can configure the windows bootloader to recognize your Linux (or grub) and just use that to manage booting two OSes and it’s less likely to not destroy things.
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.
This happened to me! Did an update, unplugged my eSATA and BAM! Can't find bootloader. I literally, physically facepalmed when I realized what happened. At least the old one still worked from the primary.
I've done a ton of Linux updates and this has never happened to me once (yet).
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.
By something strange, I assume you mean installing Windows on a disk with the other disks disconnected so Windows will create its EFI partition on that disk (since it's dumb and will create EFI partition on the first disk it finds, even if it's an HDD). Though UEFI doesn't mind, will still list all the bootloaders from different disks without any problems. You can even unplug and plug them as you wish, it still won't be corrupted this way.
Personally, I do 2 separate UEFI boot partitions. Grub is the default which can select the windows boot partition. Then Windows can do whatever it wants to it's own boot partition.
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.
I really wish Excel would work on wine. It's the only reason I do occasionally fire up windows on my duel boot. (And no the open source / browser based spreadsheet options don't always suffice, brilliant as they are).
I recently had this issue needing to run Excel macros. I ended up using Oracle Virtualbox to run Windows from inside linux. Even more linuxey is using Proxmox to run your Windows VMs but that's a bit more of a faff.
Heard you and that wouldn’t fly. Just like you’re not supposed to run Windows on mission critical systems like nuclear reactors (seriously, check the EULA), running multiple operating systems side by side is most likely out of a supported configuration and “use at your own risk”. You’d have zero standing or less for any sort of lawsuit.
But just because it is in the EULA doesn't make it legal. At a time where big tech is being kept under a microscope for antitrust regulation, I'd say that an OS that actively destroys other competing OSes on the machine it is installed on should be considered an unfair anti-competitor tactic.
Might not hold up legally, but it's still insane that the single largest vendor of operating systems cant figure out how to install a bootloader with playing russian roulette.
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.
Both my drives are the same Linux distro, I have Windows and MacOS in a VM when I need them, and Windows To Go for rare cases where I actually need to boot win11.
I know for a fact that my company's build process is twice as slow on Windows/WSL than on vanilla Linux. We have benchmarks from many different user environments.
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.
