this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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165
Windows eats partitions for breakfast (lemmy.world)
submitted 11 months ago by drbi@lemmy.world to c/memes@lemmy.ml
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[–] dingus@lemmy.ml 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 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

[–] db2@sopuli.xyz 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] dingus@lemmy.ml 9 points 11 months 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.

[–] Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Fact check: true

Source: It happened to me.

[–] ace@lemmy.ananace.dev 8 points 11 months 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.

[–] horsey@lemm.ee 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] dingus@lemmy.ml 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] horsey@lemm.ee 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] privateger@lemmy.plasmatrap.com 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What? How old is your motherboard?

[–] horsey@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months 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!

[–] SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] horsey@lemm.ee 2 points 11 months ago

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

[–] privateger@lemmy.plasmatrap.com 3 points 11 months ago

What

I am genuinely impressed.

[–] MasterNerd@lemm.ee 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Bruh that bottleneck must be insane

[–] horsey@lemm.ee 2 points 11 months ago

Yeah, games are CPU bound to say the least.

[–] jcg@halubilo.social 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Is that a 2500k by any chance?

[–] horsey@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago

2400

[–] dingus@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago

Valid reason, then.

[–] ComaScript@monyet.cc 5 points 11 months ago

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

[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months 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.

[–] sevens@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I still can't replace MS Excel.

[–] ReakDuck@lemmy.ml 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months 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@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months 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.

[–] Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 1 points 11 months 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.

[–] Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[–] stephen01king@lemmy.zip 2 points 11 months 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.

[–] eldain@feddit.nl 4 points 11 months 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.

[–] stephen01king@lemmy.zip 2 points 11 months 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.

[–] eldain@feddit.nl 2 points 11 months 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.

[–] magoosh@feddit.nl 2 points 11 months 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.

[–] eldain@feddit.nl 3 points 11 months 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.

[–] darcy@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago

have u considered multiple drives for ur pc?