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My GF recently said I can install Linux on her laptop. Then I saw Windows broke dual boot systems.
Is it safe to do a dual boot if she already has the update that broke dual booting?
Should I just figure out how to install Windows in a VM for her?
Appreciate any insight y’all can offer
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Today on “Was this caused by stupidity or malice”…
Microsoft said earlier this month it would apply “a Secure Boot Advanced Targeting (SBAT) update to block vulnerable Linux boot loaders that could have an impact on Windows security,”
(emphasis mine)
If you pick a recent distro (2022 or newer), sure. Make sure to install it in UEFI mode, though, BIOS mode will randomly break no matter what operating system you dual boot. The problem only occurs with two year old versions of Grub.
If the USB installer boots, the distro should boot too. If it doesn’t, well, find a better distro, I suppose.
Also, if you boot Windows from the Linux bootloader and have Bitlocker (disk encryption) enabled, make sure you know the recovery key. You will need to enter it once (only once) to make Windows trust the Linux bootloader enough to unlock the disks.
I’d also recommend doing the disk resizing in Windows for this reason (unless you’re putting in a second SSD). Linux can resize most Windows partitions these days, but Windows itself struggles to keep its filesystem intact when doing advanced resize stuff and their driver isn’t even based on reversed engineering.
Thank you!
it should be safe. From what I know the update only broke it as it was updating so installing a dual-boot after should be fine. You might want to test first so just install something small like mint for a test and see if it works.
It should be safe, although for the future, I’d recommend installing the os to a completely separate drive and changing boot device by uefi.
That’s what I did on my wife’s pc, and she’s had no issues with the dual boot BS Windows has created.
Thank you! I’ll look into changing the boot device
this reads like you don’t make backups or don’t have a restore strategy. if the system is important enough that you worry about updates breaking it, you should make backups from time to time and have a bootable restore system on a removable medium.
I would advice to just move to Linux all together. No need for dual boot ;)… It took me way too long to do that.
Dumb title. Yes, it’s safe. Windows has nerfed boot records for any other OS since the beginning of dual-booting. Just replace the boot record.
Also, if you want to be hardcore about it, and since everything is UEFI now, just use your BIOS boot manager to control booting. Shouldn’t be a problem.
The problem linked also breaks booting from the UEFI menu, because the motherboard boot configuration got updated to not trust known vulnerable versions of Grub.
That said, Windows stopped clobbering boot records since UEFI was introduced. It’ll change the boot order sometimes (like when it auto recovers from boot corruption) but you can always boot Linux if it does that. Unfortunately, Linux doesn’t generally come with a good boot order manager, so fixing that requires either diving into the BIOS or command line stuff.
I looked at the breakdown, and I believe it’s only changing the preference for same device.
It doesn’t change the preferences but it does replace bootx64.efi which is the default bootloader executable for a drive, when the UEFI doesn’t have more specific entries. In some configurations both Windows and GRUB want to be that.
If you add a boot entry for GRUB and don’t point it to the default executable, then it won’t be affected. Until you reset the BIOS or try to use the drive in another system that is, in which case the firmware will then only know about the default executable. But it’s easy to add the boot entries back.
