This is going to be a bit of a stupid question, so try and forgive. I’m still new to this.
I have a dual booted system, my main OS is obviously EndeavourOS, and I have dedicated one 1 TB drive to a heavily neutered installation of Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC for those stubborn games that won’t run on Linux.
Those games are stubborn due to their kernel level anticheats that I dearly despise (or just Proton is blocked by the stingy company in question). I know these anti-cheats have access to my entire Windows installation due to their nature rooted in the kernel.
But do they have access to my BTRFS formatted Linux drives and partitions, too?
I want to ensure that they are hidden, completely invisible when I use my Windows installation, so that these invasive anti-cheats don’t even attempt to access my Linux drives where my actual important data is kept. Since Windows does not support Linux FS like BTRFS, I assume that it doesn’t know the drives even exist and it can’t do anything to them.
Is that the case, or do I need to set up encryption on my Linux drives? I hope I don’t, because it’d be a bit of a pain and a bit unnecessary for a stationary desktop system that only I have access to.
And what are some tips to completely isolate my Windows drive from the rest of my drives, if any?
The partitions are not hidden but Windows can’t read the btrfs filesystem unless you install special drivers for that.
It depends what you are trying to protect against. Even encryption wouldn’t stop Windows from formatting a partition. However, it isn’t clear to me in what situation that might happen without your knowledge unless you are worried about getting some malware.
About the only way to protect for that would be to install some type of removable drive tray. Then you could physically remove the device.
I am no expert on this topic but there may be few things to consider.
If you want to access any linux filesystem you usually has to jump through several hoops - at least install a special drivers to be able to read the disk. BTRFS is not very common as EXT4 in this regard so it is unlikely you have the necessary drivers pre-installed.
Using WSL could give the windows OS most of the drivers necessary to interact with linux partition.
The OS (any OS in fact) can access any hardware on the basic level. So even when windows cannot read your data it can format your disk if it is pluged in. Data encryption will not help with that.
It depends what are you trying to protect your linux system from.
After some consideration I ended up going the nuclear way and completely nuked Windows from my PC, no trace of it left. Formatted the drive as BTRFS and now I have 1 TB of additional space. Made sure to remove any EFI leftovers and edited grub config as well.
I decided that any company that uses kernel level malware or blocks Proton for absolutely no reason even if it would have worked otherwise, does not deserve my money or my time.
That being said, does anyone know if the EAC runtime in Proton is “kernel level” at all? Is that even possible in Linux?