The last straw for me was when Windows kept overwriting my boot loader. Fixed it by blowing away the Windows partition. Thanks for playing, we have a lovely parting gift for you!
i very much prefer separate boxes, but i do have one dual boot system, and i let windows do it instead of grub. it sucks, basically booting windows up just to get the boot menu to switch to linux, but hey. it works. even survived an 8->11 ‘upgrade’ intact.
If I had to dual boot, I’d be doing it with hot-swappable drives in enclosure bays. The Linux system drive would never be physically attached to the computer when Windows was running. Windows would have no way to even know it was being dual booted.
my ideal setup at one time was a huge case with lots of drive bays and a switch or switches on front to choose which drives to have connected and powered-up.
i only ever got so far as to have the case and a few drives. i did ‘dual boot’ it for years, though, by simply swapping cables internally. lateral bays put the connectors close to the side panel, which itself was easy to slide on and off. it wasn’t very often, so i never got ‘motivated enough’ to get the switch for it.
i never have had an opportunity to pull or salvage a functional hot-swappable bay or enclosure and sleds. i did run across one once, but internally it was usb 2 so it got tossed on the recycle pile like the old junk it came in.
yea, i know they can be relatively inexpensive. but i saw them as a waste of money–which was and still is in short supply.
nearly everything i have as far as pc stuff was salvaged or given to me. the last things i bought myself was 24tb of hdds for media storage (when they were still ‘cheap’), replacing a literal laundry basket of small (160gb-2tb) 2.5in, 3.5in and externals that was getting to be an unmanageable mess.
But Microsoft removed the “start Linux” option from their bootloader in windows 10 and higher when booting in EFI mode. Maybe you’re still booting in CSM mode and you patched w11 to allow this? (W11 doesn’t support csm mode)
it is very much a ‘legacy’ system that has no clue what uefi is. but it has plenty of ram, decent-enough gpu, and the cpu is still faster than some of the cheap shit sold today by the major oems.
You must have missed that the Windows version/implementation of SecureBoot … and/or BitLocker… have had various NSA backdoors for years.
Thats why shit seems to keep breaking in new crazy ways: Whoops, that backdoor got found out, time to rollout a new one, via a Windows update, that can overwrite your bootsector, on its own, whenever it wants to.
They keep fucking with the bootloader and breaking most dual boot configs because they don’t like the idea that they will not always be able to tap your computer via a secret warrant issued by a secret court.
You can’t build in a backdoor as a reliable method of spying on people, because people who aren’t supposed to know its there will figure it out in… not actually very much time.
There are very good reasons why huge chunks of the EU has their government agencies throwing out Windows.
Yes. It’s pretty funny reading someone so confident in all the extra security they’re getting from Windows messing with their boot sequence, earlier in this thread.
Corporate OS is going to corporate. End users and private files are rarely winners when corporate needs to corporate hard.
Like, a few years ago, I could have at least held my nose and said ‘well, Windows has so many business oriented tools and services, that do at least 90% work for what any particular business could need, that… sure, fine, makes sense as a business OS, not a personal use OS, but enterprise sure fine whatever.’
Now? Now after CoPilot/GitHub/vibe coding destroying half of Windows… the insane CVEs in the last few years, every tech CEO developing AI Psychosis? US gov policy just literally being: ‘Our software spying is extremely legitimate, everyone elses makes them a terrrorist, and also you’re a terrorist if you don’t like our spying’?
Fucking no way, you’d have to be ignorant, insane or an idiot to want to use Windows, for literally anything.
They could at least be… subtle, or clever, or have some kind of even slightly convincing rhetorical position/explanation.
But nope, just balls to the wall ‘This PC = OUR PC’
I’ve had the same dual boot configuration since around 2018 and this never happens to me, yet I keep reading that it happens to others. I really wonder what I did differently.
I’ve had the same dual boot configuration since around 2018 and this never happens to me, yet I keep reading that it happens to others. I really wonder what I did differently.
We have very long memories.
In my defense, an OS that I paid for breaking my boot settings was such a virus thing to do, it was really memorable.
I’ve never ran a dual boot setup but from what I read having windows and Linux on separate physical drives is what makes sure windows won’t Bork the Linux boot partition
Microsoft does different things in different regions and different things in different versions of Windows. Even for the same version in the same region, they may be running an A/B test on you.
(It also may depend on exactly how you’ve set up your bootloader – EFI or MBR, whether it’s on the same physical drive as the Windows partition or not, etc.)
But just because it hasn’t happened to you doesn’t mean that it hasn’t happened to others.
The last straw for me was when Windows kept overwriting my boot loader. Fixed it by blowing away the Windows partition. Thanks for playing, we have a lovely parting gift for you!
That’s how my dual booting experiment ended, as well.
Gotta tell you, it felt better than I expected. I was like, “Yeah! Suck it, Microsoft!” lol.
It’s funny that they have been doing the exact same for decades at this point.
Windows already fucked with the booloader when lilo was the default in every distro. They have no reason to learn, it’s all part of the way.
i very much prefer separate boxes, but i do have one dual boot system, and i let windows do it instead of grub. it sucks, basically booting windows up just to get the boot menu to switch to linux, but hey. it works. even survived an 8->11 ‘upgrade’ intact.
If I had to dual boot, I’d be doing it with hot-swappable drives in enclosure bays. The Linux system drive would never be physically attached to the computer when Windows was running. Windows would have no way to even know it was being dual booted.
my ideal setup at one time was a huge case with lots of drive bays and a switch or switches on front to choose which drives to have connected and powered-up.
i only ever got so far as to have the case and a few drives. i did ‘dual boot’ it for years, though, by simply swapping cables internally. lateral bays put the connectors close to the side panel, which itself was easy to slide on and off. it wasn’t very often, so i never got ‘motivated enough’ to get the switch for it.
i never have had an opportunity to pull or salvage a functional hot-swappable bay or enclosure and sleds. i did run across one once, but internally it was usb 2 so it got tossed on the recycle pile like the old junk it came in.
You don’t have to find any. Hot swappable bays aren’t terribly expensive.
yea, i know they can be relatively inexpensive. but i saw them as a waste of money–which was and still is in short supply.
nearly everything i have as far as pc stuff was salvaged or given to me. the last things i bought myself was 24tb of hdds for media storage (when they were still ‘cheap’), replacing a literal laundry basket of small (160gb-2tb) 2.5in, 3.5in and externals that was getting to be an unmanageable mess.
Another idea could be to connect both disks normally but have a switch on the power line of both (if you are willing to make circuits yourself)
Edit: I come up with a circuit that probably explains better what i want to do
i had thought of that, but my setup would have had more drives than ports so i needed a switch that did power and signal.
instead of all that now, i just have a literal stack of old pizzabox form factor sff and switch between entire systems.
If it works, it works XD
But Microsoft removed the “start Linux” option from their bootloader in windows 10 and higher when booting in EFI mode. Maybe you’re still booting in CSM mode and you patched w11 to allow this? (W11 doesn’t support csm mode)
it is very much a ‘legacy’ system that has no clue what uefi is. but it has plenty of ram, decent-enough gpu, and the cpu is still faster than some of the cheap shit sold today by the major oems.
You must have missed that the Windows version/implementation of SecureBoot … and/or BitLocker… have had various NSA backdoors for years.
Thats why shit seems to keep breaking in new crazy ways: Whoops, that backdoor got found out, time to rollout a new one, via a Windows update, that can overwrite your bootsector, on its own, whenever it wants to.
They keep fucking with the bootloader and breaking most dual boot configs because they don’t like the idea that they will not always be able to tap your computer via a secret warrant issued by a secret court.
You can’t build in a backdoor as a reliable method of spying on people, because people who aren’t supposed to know its there will figure it out in… not actually very much time.
There are very good reasons why huge chunks of the EU has their government agencies throwing out Windows.
Google locking down Android is the same thing.
Yes. It’s pretty funny reading someone so confident in all the extra security they’re getting from Windows messing with their boot sequence, earlier in this thread.
Corporate OS is going to corporate. End users and private files are rarely winners when corporate needs to corporate hard.
Its really wild.
Like, a few years ago, I could have at least held my nose and said ‘well, Windows has so many business oriented tools and services, that do at least 90% work for what any particular business could need, that… sure, fine, makes sense as a business OS, not a personal use OS, but enterprise sure fine whatever.’
Now? Now after CoPilot/GitHub/vibe
codingdestroying half of Windows… the insane CVEs in the last few years, every tech CEO developing AI Psychosis? US gov policy just literally being: ‘Our software spying is extremely legitimate, everyone elses makes them a terrrorist, and also you’re a terrorist if you don’t like our spying’?Fucking no way, you’d have to be ignorant, insane or an idiot to want to use Windows, for literally anything.
They could at least be… subtle, or clever, or have some kind of even slightly convincing rhetorical position/explanation.
But nope, just balls to the wall ‘This PC = OUR PC’
I’ve had the same dual boot configuration since around 2018 and this never happens to me, yet I keep reading that it happens to others. I really wonder what I did differently.
We have very long memories.
In my defense, an OS that I paid for breaking my boot settings was such a virus thing to do, it was really memorable.
I’ve never ran a dual boot setup but from what I read having windows and Linux on separate physical drives is what makes sure windows won’t Bork the Linux boot partition
That’s not it, I have both operating system partitions on my Samsung 970 Evo, and they both share a 100MB EFI System Partition, on that same disk.
Microsoft does different things in different regions and different things in different versions of Windows. Even for the same version in the same region, they may be running an A/B test on you.
(It also may depend on exactly how you’ve set up your bootloader – EFI or MBR, whether it’s on the same physical drive as the Windows partition or not, etc.)
But just because it hasn’t happened to you doesn’t mean that it hasn’t happened to others.
It overwrote my luks master keys and that was the last straw. The bootloader installed to multiple data drives was just icing on the cake.
Was it BIOS or UEFI?