this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Windows eats partitions for breakfast (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by drbi to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Luckily it's usually an easy fix if you know your way around the UEFI. Just plop grub back where it needs to be in the boot order.

Although I definitely wish Windows didn't mess with the boot order occassionally.

Also, finally, I dual-boot and I haven't actually had this happen in about a year now. I think maybe Microsoft finally stopped fucking around (with this one thing).

EDIT: Actually, it could be because I'm on Windows 10 and they stopped "Feature Updates" and all I get are security updates now. That could be why they stopped fucking with my boot order.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-sorry-but-no-more-feature-updates-for-windows-10

[–] czech 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had to put a password on my bios to get windows 10 to stop messing with my boot order.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Smart.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can't recall a single feature from any feature update being added.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

What users consider "Features" and what Microsoft considers "Features" are wildly different. I'd say that probably played a role in it.

Honestly, the only useful "features" in Windows I've found in the last few years were all provided by a non-standard Microsoft app that isn't easy to find: PowerToys.

PowerShell is nice too, but it's not new enough to be considered a "feature" anymore.

[–] kvothe99 5 points 1 year ago

Actually, it could be because I'm on Windows 10 and they stopped "Feature Updates" and all I get are security updates now. That could be why they stopped fucking with my boot order.

Same here, I was wondering why my days were so (relatively) calm as of late...

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The partition is there. It's just that Windows overwrites the MBR as if no other operating systems could possibly exist.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's 2023, Linux has great UEFI support, there is no reason to be using MBR over GPT.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My system doesn't have UEFI support, so there's that.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What? How old is your motherboard?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I have a 2nd gen I5 and a 3070. Great combo. It was my brother's old system and I hadn't had a desktop in 10 years, so I added the video card... guess I'll be upgrading sometime soon!

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Jesus, do your video card's fans even come on?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Nope. The only time the GPU gets over 40-50% is when rendering AI images.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bruh that bottleneck must be insane

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, games are CPU bound to say the least.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

What

I am genuinely impressed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is that a 2500k by any chance?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

2400

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Valid reason, then.

[–] BleatingZombie 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's 2023, Linux has great UEFI support, there is ~no~ ONE reason to be using MBR over GPT.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I have to admit, I'm a little surprised someone has a machine that doesn't support UEFI, because the board I bought in 2012 had UEFI support... 11 years puts most machines into barely being usable in Windows.

While it's a valid reason, guy has to be working with either some really old or very specific hardware.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

its not that weird considering the cult-like appreciation of old thinkpads

[–] Electricblush 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The thing is... I think a lot of people don't know that they have uefi support...

I have had the same windows install and motherboard (AMD is so great with long term socket support) for years, and figuring out how to change my bios and os setting so that I got a propper uefi boot was non-trivial.

Uefi has been a thing for a long time, but it's not been the default for motherboards afaik. So you have had to go into bios and find the right settings.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Fact check: true

Source: It happened to me.

[–] baatliwala 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fact check: false

Source: It didn't happen to me.

Checkmate atheists.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

crowd gasping

Fact check.... false?? (it's false? did they just say fact check false? my goodness they fact checked it false! nothing's ever false! my god!)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is this why my grub disappeared? I didnt pay attention on my gaming pc and then a few weeks later I noticed when I wanted to boot into linux. Fucking windows.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Check your boot order in uefi, if grub is not in there, it's evivars got deleted by a bios update, which can happen in windows depending on your motherboard vendor.

Some live usbs (I know manjaro's does) present you the option to boot from disk, so you can get into your system without chrooting and reinstall grub + evivars.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

have u considered multiple drives for ur pc?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Never happened to me and I've been dual booting for a couple of years already. On the other side, updating linux mint from 20 to 21 made my printer not work despite installing and reinstalling the drivers many times ( tried the driver from the official website, random scripts from GitHub, nothing works). It's pretty dumb having to boot crapdows (it takes 20 minutes to just boot no joke and i freaking debloated that shit the day i installed it.) to print anything and it's basically why none of my family wants to deal with linux.

[–] SaiPenguin 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just a thought, no idea if it would work for your situation, would you be able to use a Windows vm, that way you wouldn’t have to reboot?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

as the "it takes 20 minutes to boot" implies, the computer is pretty weak. 4GB ddr3, HDD and a i3 4xxx.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Back when I used to dual-boot, I had Windows on its own drive just for when it gets these ideas in its head.

Had a slightly similar - but also very different - experience that finally weaned me off of dual-booting though.
Back when Windows 10 was releasing their "fall update", something had broken in the updating procedure and Windows would - on every reboot - attempt to install said update and then fail and roll it back.

At least until it at one point suddenly "succeeded" in installing the update.
The updater took ages to run, and then when it finally rebooted the entire drive was just gone. Partition table was still there, but messed up. Partitions were still there, but contained garbage in their superblocks. Even the EFI binaries were trashed, and the Windows setup couldn't recognize it as a valid Windows install to attempt recovery on.
I ended up taking a block-level copy of the entire drive from Linux, ran a bunch of file restore tools on that to try and recover what little data I had stored on the Windows drive itself, to some success. And at that point I was long past fed up with the mess that was running a Windows desktop, so it was also the last time I've ever had Windows installed on physical hardware - though I have had to load up VMs to run a couple of horribly written hardware OEM tools since.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just use wsl2 instead of dual booting, haven't had a real issue since Just ran into a few hiccups where you have to clear the environment variable $DISPLAY whenever you're using a package manager besides apt and apt-get, for instance whenever you're using pip

[–] kvothe99 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I used WSL2 for about a year between distro hops.

I agree it's mostly the more peaceful way if you can't afford to just remove Windows altogether.

Still love me some freshly installed Linux tho :(

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I like Linux desktop environments more (KDE GNOME LXDE...) they're look pretty slick smooth and highly customizable, if I hadn't using an old PC and OC is a must I'll surly switch to Linux

[–] kvothe99 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

So, long story ahead...

Couple weeks ago Windows screwed me over by converting a disk to dynamic disk (whatever that means) when trying to extend a partition, making it impossible to boot to Linux since whatever format is used for dynamic disks is proprietary, also, it just plain removed my GRUB from existence.

Then when trying to roll that back with obscure methods (since Microsoft claims in all their documentation and forums that the only way to roll back to basic disk is by wiping and reformatting) I ended up with two conflicting partition tables!

Long story short(er) I painfully backed up everything, took my chance on the MBR table since it looked the least scary of the two (luckily I was right), and reinstalled GRUB from a bootable USB.

I lost a Saturday on that shit and learned to never touch a single drive from Windows ever again.

PS: Always back up your data regularly, because fuck me Windows makes existing almost intolerable.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I've been using systemd-boot instead during the last time I had to dual boot which lasted for like 2 years

Windows didn't interfere with systemd-boot at all and stood the test of time even after the many updates

(Probably because Lennard Poettering now work for Microsoft)

[–] RememberTheApollo_ 4 points 1 year ago

Some of the new motherboards will recognize dual boot systems natively. My ASUS saw the partitions when I upgraded my motherboard and gives me a boot option menu. Super easy. Not that GRUB was too difficult.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The last time I dual-booted, which is a while ago, it was grub that keeps losing my windows boot option. Not sure what happened there, since I'm still a newbie at Linux.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The OS_prober feature is disabled by default in GRUB 2.06, which is the version included in Ubuntu 22.04. This is an upstream change designed to counter potential security issues with the OS-detecting feature (it mounts partitions to check for other OSes, this could be taken advantage of, etc).

That's why. You need to enable the os_prober in your grub settings manually or put your windows line in /etc/default/grub or so.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yo, thanks for this. I'll save this for the next time I'm motivated enough to try dual-booting again. Currently I just care about playing games, so tinkering with it will have to wait.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You're welcome, I'm happy to point out the correct term to search for.

If you don't want to take care of stuff like this, you can choose a distro like Mint that would be more sensitive to shield their users from changes like this. There is plenty to learn and tinker without having to follow upstream news that could break your system.

[–] sevens 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I still can't replace MS Excel.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Then don't.

But could you use the web version? Except you are pirating it. I also assume that some features don't exist in the web version but Microsoft pushed the usage to web versions by banning Chromebook users from downloading Office from Play Store.

[–] sevens 2 points 1 year ago

I have used the Web version but it does not have those "Alt" key shortcuts, that's the only thing I miss in Libre Calc. That and the auto complete.

I'm using pirated Excel 2016. Has not crashed even once. While the web thing freezes as it wishes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I've been quite happy with wps office as a replacement to Ms office products. Much happier than I was using Libre office. I dunno if it will do everything you do in excel, but it does everything I'm used to doing in excel.