How can I stop Windows from overriding the boot record?

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

Hi. I have EOS installed on one drive with systemd-boot, Windows 11 24H2 on another All was working fine until today for some reason Windows decided to override the boot partition on the EOS drive with a duplicate of its own bootloader. So now both drives would boot into the Windows installation on the Windows drive.

I spent a couple of hours figuring out how to chroot into EOS and reinstall systemd-boot with reinstall-kernels. At first it didn’t work for some reason, then I did blkid and noticed that in /etc/fstab the GUID associated with /efi was not listed, so I changed /etc/fstab to the correct GUID (even though that partition was actually mounted to /boot when I ran reinstall-kernels).
Anyhow, that seemed to fix it, or it was a fluke, because I finally managed to boot into EOS. The Windows entry is not showing in the systemd boot menu but I can probably figure that out.

My question is: Is there any way to stop this from happening again?

2

Yeah don’t dual boot with Windows. This is known behavior from Microsoft as they have NO RESPECT for what the USER has on thier system.

2 Likes
3

As TheFrog already wrote, don’t install Windows on the same machine. Keep Linux on one computer and Windows on another.

4

If it isn’t a laptop and you’re using standard 2.5" SSDs you could either:

  1. If you have a desktop case with a spare 3.5" drive bay, you could put in a swappable drive caddy (something like this - Joskeijky 2.5 Inch to 3.5 Inch Internal Floppy Bay ) so that you only have 1 disk active at a time and just swap whichever OS disk you want to use, or
  2. If you don’t have a spare bay but do have a spare standard blanking plate available on the case then you could run a SATA cable to an external ESATA port attached to the blanking plate ( 1 Port SATA to eSATA Slot Plate Bracket ) then attach an ESATA cable ( 3 feet Shielded External eSATA Cable ) and buy a couple of external ESATA enclosures ( Vantec 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s to USB 3.0/eSATA HDD Enclosure ), or get an external ESATA enclosure where you can swap the drives.

Either way if your Linux disk isn’t attached to your machine then Windows can’t mess it up… yet :sweat_smile: