Whoa… this really happens? If so that’s disgusting and doesn’t seem legal. I was about to setup a dual boot for my laptop which has proprietary windows only software I need for work but now I guess i need to research a bit.
I unplug physicals disks when installing windows. Learned the hard way when windows placed the boot partition on a device it could not detect the filsystem of. It destroyed my RAID disks (a little but my fault, because I messed up the recovery).
This is what Windows installer saw (going by memory, this was 8 years ago)
SSD 500 GB (either it recognised ext4 file system, or this one was unknown)
SSD 500 GB (Where I specified to install windows)
4 x HDD 8TB (unknown disks, unknown file system, Windows unaware that this was a RAID-5 software dm-raid)
What did it to? It created a new partition table and wrote data to a new boot partition it made on one of the 8TB disks, no questions asked.
So, to the people who answered you that windows installer cannot do this. Maybe they fixed it. But it certainly could, and it cetianly did. I remember very carefully going through the installer because I was concerned about this happening. I thought about unplugging them, but was lazy. Because “it would be insane for windows to write on a disk it cannot identify the file system of”.
Lessons learned:
If you plan to install windows on a disk along side Linux, install windows first, if you can. Safest bet is still to:
If you cannot, unplug all other disks other than the one windows is intended to be on.
Edit: I found post on this way back when, but leaving what I wrote as is.
Windows couldn’t even use its own system image to restore my system when a botched Windows update messed everything up. I still don’t know what was wrong but I think it did something like try to apply them as GPT instead of MBR on my BIOS system.
Fixed or not this is good to know. I use a separate device for RAID storage and I think I’ll keep it that way. Sorry you had to deal with that. I know if my main storage got wiped by windows installer my reaction would probably make national news.
No, the only thing that windows might do, is reset the bootloader so it skips grub. If you’re using UEFI (which you should), you can easily restore it from your bios.
I’ve only seen it happen on big updates, not the smaller ones.
As an Ubuntu + Win10 dual booter I had a couple of instances where Windows update destroyed things so irreparably that live Ubuntu boot-repair failed to work, and hours of back-and-forthing error messages to Ubuntu IRC and discord support channels yielded nothing. And I’m too stupid to know any other way of fixing it, so I was SOL. Your milage may vary.
Have had Windows remove my Grub entry plenty of times but have also had Windows “repair” partitions after a failed update which will nuke your Linux install.
actually this has happened to me where windows fucked with the file system of both my ext4 Linux OS partition and shared ntfs data partition. A reformat and repartition was the only remedy, so reinstall of the OS and recovery from a backup of the data were required
I wouldn’t agree here. Even if Windows does do this (which I doubt), there’s no way to prove it isn’t a bug. And there’s no way anyone’s going to sue Microsoft over a bug. Not only is that a gross overreaction, it’s financial suicide.
If you don’t trust Windows, don’t use it. Or if you have to, use it on a separate system/drive.
Don’t need proof that it isn’t a bug, it’s happened to me multiple times since Windows xp, all the way until the last time I tried dual booting with windows 7…
At that time, I decided if a game doesn’t work in Linux, I don’t need it. Luckily dxvk and proton came around that time
I don’t care if it’s a bug or if it’s intentional. Fuck off windows
If you find that already illegal… there are vendors signing their own drivers with the pre-installed Microsoft Secure Boot keys. So trying to remove them and replace them with proper ones bricks your system.
That’s awful. Not new, but i guess it’s becoming more common.
I was forced to abandon Linux on desktop in 2007. This year on a whim I got back a couple AIOs I had gifted and installed KDE neon and was blown away at how nice it was. And absurdly fast at that.
My main still has to run win for not just games but also Visio. What really gets me is the tools platform i need for work will only run on win despite it being essentially java based. If allowed to run on native Linux I can’t help but think it would be much much faster.
I’m currently testing out a portable base win10VM for those softwares. Not an ideal solution but it’s working.
I guess while I’m at it I’ll go ahead and ask… is there any OSS alternative to Visio?
This happens with most Linux installs particularly with Windows 11, but you can still boot to Linux from your BIOS. Interestingly enough, the only Linux distro where this has not happened is Fedora, which also doesn’t fuck the system clock up to make the Windows clock wrong. Fedora seems to be doing everything right these days.
“required” in quote is the correct way to write it. Windows actually requires shit. It will block you from upgrading because of irrelevant requirements but then let’s you install it normally. And in best Microsoft tradition more expensive versions of Windows will let you ignore more of the meaningless requirements. (Just like the basic version will nowadays require a MS account and being online to install, while other versions don’t.)
Whoa… this really happens? If so that’s disgusting and doesn’t seem legal. I was about to setup a dual boot for my laptop which has proprietary windows only software I need for work but now I guess i need to research a bit.
I unplug physicals disks when installing windows. Learned the hard way when windows placed the boot partition on a device it could not detect the filsystem of. It destroyed my RAID disks (a little but my fault, because I messed up the recovery).
This is what Windows installer saw (going by memory, this was 8 years ago)
What did it to? It created a new partition table and wrote data to a new boot partition it made on one of the 8TB disks, no questions asked.
So, to the people who answered you that windows installer cannot do this. Maybe they fixed it. But it certainly could, and it cetianly did. I remember very carefully going through the installer because I was concerned about this happening. I thought about unplugging them, but was lazy. Because “it would be insane for windows to write on a disk it cannot identify the file system of”.
Lessons learned:
Edit: I found post on this way back when, but leaving what I wrote as is.
https://superuser.com/questions/758854/mdadm-win7-install-created-a-boot-partition-on-one-of-my-raid6-drives-how-to-r#1243636
I had remembered some details wrong. I had unplugged the Linux SSD, and it wad raid 6 not 5, and it was 2TB disks.
Windows couldn’t even use its own system image to restore my system when a botched Windows update messed everything up. I still don’t know what was wrong but I think it did something like try to apply them as GPT instead of MBR on my BIOS system.
Fixed or not this is good to know. I use a separate device for RAID storage and I think I’ll keep it that way. Sorry you had to deal with that. I know if my main storage got wiped by windows installer my reaction would probably make national news.
Will proceed with caution and saved drive images!
No, the only thing that windows might do, is reset the bootloader so it skips grub. If you’re using UEFI (which you should), you can easily restore it from your bios.
I’ve only seen it happen on big updates, not the smaller ones.
As an Ubuntu + Win10 dual booter I had a couple of instances where Windows update destroyed things so irreparably that live Ubuntu boot-repair failed to work, and hours of back-and-forthing error messages to Ubuntu IRC and discord support channels yielded nothing. And I’m too stupid to know any other way of fixing it, so I was SOL. Your milage may vary.
Have had Windows remove my Grub entry plenty of times but have also had Windows “repair” partitions after a failed update which will nuke your Linux install.
actually this has happened to me where windows fucked with the file system of both my ext4 Linux OS partition and shared ntfs data partition. A reformat and repartition was the only remedy, so reinstall of the OS and recovery from a backup of the data were required
I wouldn’t agree here. Even if Windows does do this (which I doubt), there’s no way to prove it isn’t a bug. And there’s no way anyone’s going to sue Microsoft over a bug. Not only is that a gross overreaction, it’s financial suicide.
If you don’t trust Windows, don’t use it. Or if you have to, use it on a separate system/drive.
Don’t need proof that it isn’t a bug, it’s happened to me multiple times since Windows xp, all the way until the last time I tried dual booting with windows 7…
At that time, I decided if a game doesn’t work in Linux, I don’t need it. Luckily dxvk and proton came around that time
I don’t care if it’s a bug or if it’s intentional. Fuck off windows
Not with EFI boot. If you deliberately use legacy BIOS emulation to boot, it can. So don’t do that.
If you find that already illegal… there are vendors signing their own drivers with the pre-installed Microsoft Secure Boot keys. So trying to remove them and replace them with proper ones bricks your system.
That’s awful. Not new, but i guess it’s becoming more common.
I was forced to abandon Linux on desktop in 2007. This year on a whim I got back a couple AIOs I had gifted and installed KDE neon and was blown away at how nice it was. And absurdly fast at that.
My main still has to run win for not just games but also Visio. What really gets me is the tools platform i need for work will only run on win despite it being essentially java based. If allowed to run on native Linux I can’t help but think it would be much much faster.
I’m currently testing out a portable base win10VM for those softwares. Not an ideal solution but it’s working.
I guess while I’m at it I’ll go ahead and ask… is there any OSS alternative to Visio?
This happens with most Linux installs particularly with Windows 11, but you can still boot to Linux from your BIOS. Interestingly enough, the only Linux distro where this has not happened is Fedora, which also doesn’t fuck the system clock up to make the Windows clock wrong. Fedora seems to be doing everything right these days.
How’d you install Windows 11 on BIOS? I thought it “required” features unique to EFI?
“required” in quote is the correct way to write it. Windows actually requires shit. It will block you from upgrading because of irrelevant requirements but then let’s you install it normally. And in best Microsoft tradition more expensive versions of Windows will let you ignore more of the meaningless requirements. (Just like the basic version will nowadays require a MS account and being online to install, while other versions don’t.)
BIOS meaning the EFI boot menu. It’s a generic term that we refuse to let die just because EFI has taken over.