Not sure if this is a “me-issue” or if this is Microsoft being a dick.

Am I not supposed to dualboot with an external drive?

  • wuffah@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Fun fact: Windows will overwrite GRUB if you install Windows after Linux or otherwise perform an action that allows it to mess with the boot loader.

    • Theoriginalthon@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Fun fact part 2: windows will (or used to) overwrite grub when installing updates, but not all updates that would make it predictable and less fun

        • BT_7274@lemmy.world
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          21 hours ago

          It did to me. I actually stopped using Arch because I thought an Arch update nuked my bootloader during an update. It wasn’t until a couple years later when I’d learned more that I realized it was more than likely windows “upgrading” to 11.

      • Rhaedas@fedia.io
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        1 day ago

        I’ve found the only long-term, totally happy dual boot system is where you autoboot into Linux. And never boot into Windows. Every now and then I have to go back into my Win10 to do something (much rarer now, almost ready to reclaim some space). Boy, Windows hates having any signs you’ve been somewhere else.

    • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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      19 hours ago

      That’s for MBR partitioned disks, where they fight over the first sector of the disk which is used as the boot sector.

      Computer models starting from around 2013 should support UEFI boot. If you boot in UEFI mode you use a GPT partitioned disk with an EFI System Partition. In there Windows does not overwrite grub. In mine for example grub was in the ESP under /EFI/fedora/ and Microsoft found the ESP and put its stuff in /EFI/Microsoft.

      The worst I’ve experienced is that Windows puts the Windows Boot Manager back on top of the UEFI boot order, to fix that, I wrote a comment before, that I’ll just link here, if it’s really just the order you can also just change it back in the UEFI menu.

      Another bad thing is that some laptop UEFIs, especially early ones are utterly broken. They ignore your boot order, or your entries in the UEFI boot manager, sometimes they just load the fallback path defined in the UEFI spec, which is \EFI\Boot\BOOTX64.efi, but that’s the OEMs fault. I’ve seen both Fedora and Microsoft write their loader to the fallback path. I’m not sure if they clobber the other ones if it exists already, because I never boot from that path, so I wouldn’t notice.