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Tell HN: Windows 11 update erases Linux boot entries

8 points by kartoshechka ↗ HN
Yesterday I've had the misfortune of letting windows do the chunky 22H2 update, simultaneously with actually useful BIOS update. Mind you, it didn't break anything immediately.

Today, after at least two reboot cycles between windows and linux, refind gave an "Invalid loader files" error upon choosing linux. Okay, maybe windows didn't finish its update -> do more windows updates -> linux entry is completely gone.

Can't even say I'm back to pirating, just beware

19 comments

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jlpcsl
Just format that partition used by abusive corporate spyware by Microsoft and leave only free and open source GNU/Linux that actually respects your freedom, privacy and other basic digital/human rights.
taraharris
Please consider replacing your Windows install with Haiku OS and just give up on running the programs you keep Windows around for. Your freedom over the long haul is far more important than whatever it is that Microsoft is doing for you. I spend my time these days writing native apps for Haiku in C++, which is a lot more fun than playing in a sandbox stacked against us all.
David20
Haiku OS better than Linux Mint?
acuozzo
> just give up on running the programs you keep Windows around for

You realize that you're asking for many people to give up their livelihood(s), right?

Consider film restoration. Very few companies have attempted to venture outside of the Windows & Mac OS X ecosystems.

So what is a professional film restoration company supposed to do? Close up shop?

lax4ever
Yeah, that's actually pretty common behavior for Windows and a well documented drawback of dual-booting Windows and Linux.
kartoshechka
I've never had that in ~4 years of dual booting with windows 10, but it also was grub most of that time
lax4ever
I would consider myself lucky if I were in your position. I have dualbooted on several machines, and Windows updates have broken at least half of them. I wish you continued good fortune in the future!
earthling8118
Once I got into Linux I ditched Windows in less time of dual booting than that. The primary reason was precisely this. It has no respect for the computer's owner and will do as it pleases. This is with grub too. It had to be eradicated from any machine I cared about.
favourable
Yeah at first, dual booting always sounds like a good idea, but it often fails and has sharp edges and rare edge case situations where people struggle to get everything working again, fighting GRUB and messing with partitions. Virtual Machines are the way.
goosedragons
Yup yup. Have had this happen countless times with Windows features updates. They always blow away the boot sector so Windows is the last one standing. Now I know better to install Windows on it's own seperate drive.
slipwalker
and why anyone would allow windows to touch their hardware directly ?! it belongs ( at best ) inside a QEMU/KVM vm.
seanw444
Even if you use it for gaming. Get a cheap GPU as a display driver, slap it in an extra PCIe slot, let Linux use that card as a simple display driver, and then pass through your beefy GPU. If you have it configured right, the performance difference will be nearly on par with bare metal. It actually baffles me how good QEMU/KVM is.
ManlyBread
>If you have it configured right

Yeah, no, I'd like to unwind and have fun instead of messing around with config files and drivers

seanw444
It's surprisingly straightforward, especially with the Arch Wiki. The main two things are:

- Figuring out input switching. You don't want your inputs locked into the guest until you shut the guest down.

- CPU pinning. Otherwise your performance will get hammered with your L3 cache getting trampled by the host.

Do it once, and it's way more straightforward from then on than dual booting. Especially because then you can use virtual disks that only take as much disk space as you want to use, and they're easily resizable via NBD. Rather than allocating a huge static partition on your drive.

And then Microsoft and all the blackbox code your games run don't have the capability of spying on the rest of your storage by default.

ManlyBread
I appreciate the answer but I want absolutely nothing to do with configuring anything when I sit down to play a game.
kartoshechka
btw if someone ever stumble upon this, regenerating initramfs solved the problem
senjindarashiva
In microsofts defence this issue isn't linux specific... dual booting two windows 11 installations causes similar issues, where they invalidate or remove eachothers boot sectors
ManlyBread
Again? Windows 10 did a very similar thing to me.
pthr
Look into unified kernel images (UKI). That makes you independent on a bootloader; whenever things go wrong (like Windows overwriting your Linux related entries), just use the 'boot from file' function in the UEFI firmware and select your Linux UKI to boot directly from that.

Arch Wiki is, as often, a great starting point: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_kernel_image