Blau's Blog

Blau's Dual Boot Adventures

Date: [20th Sep 2024]
Categories: [Computers], [From Cohost]

I originally live-posted this on Cohost, then summarized it on an old Mastodon account. I figured this was a good place to retell, as I call it, The Fucking Saga.

This whole debacle started a little under a year ago, somewhere around December of 2023. Windows was being very Windows. I don't remember exactly what new stupid thing Microsoft was trying to do at the time, but it was enough that it made me want to seriously try Linux again.

I do like Linux. I've used a couple different distros and have had the best times with Ubuntu and Linux Mint (and from what I can remember of it, Fedora was nice too). It's been quite a while since I really used it though - I used to have Linux Mint installed on my 16-odd-year-old laptop, but all that thing really did was play Youtube videos for me to fall asleep to, and I quit doing that when I rearranged my room and there was nowhere to put the laptop near my bed¹.

And by "quite a while", I mean years. I went through a phase in the early-mid 2010s of trying out a bunch of different distros, briefly dual-booting my desktop, and then I just... stopped doing that. Knowing me, I found something new to do and forgot about it.

Anyway, about a year ago, Windows was being especially Windows, and I decided it was a good time to give dual-booting a try again. My goal was to eventually have Ubuntu set up well enough that I could use that as my daily driver OS, and only go back to Windows when it was necessary (some of the software I use is Windows-only with no feasible way to run them under Linux that I'm aware of). Lofty goal! Changing your daily driver OS environment that drastically is a big step, but I wanted to give it a go.

The installation wasn't too difficult. I allocated a bit under half of my primary SSD to Ubuntu, let it install, got the post-install updates taken care of, got some programs I use regularly installed and their settings copied over. The only thing that I recall giving me much trouble was finding an alternative to Voicemeeter Banana² that ran on Linux, which taught me that there are apparently multiple audio systems in Linux, which started a Confusion Event in which I tried to figure out which audio system Ubuntu uses by default and whether I needed to install a new one (which is apparently a colossal pain). I don't think I really needed to change anything, though. Eventually though I found Pulsemeeter and got that working acceptably³.

I had Ubuntu set as my primary boot OS for a while afterward. If I wanted to boot into Windows⁴, I'd have to actively tell it to do so. This was fine for a while, then I noticed that I was just defaulting to Windows more often than not. Eventually I just swapped the default boot OS back to Windows, and eventually my Ubuntu use slowed down enough that I forgot it was there, aside from the GRUB menu on boot.

Jump ahead about four months. I notice that my startup seems faster than it used to be. I realize that that's because the GRUB menu doesn't show up anymore. Huh. That's... odd. I didn't uninstall it, or otherwise tell it to stop doing that, so why isn't it there?

Curious, I tried to boot into Ubuntu. I'm greeted with the GRUB minimal bash-like interface.

That's... ah. That's not right. That's very not right.

Nothing I try in the minimal interface does anything. I look up guides on which commands to try, and none of them really did anything, aside from one failure telling me that it can't access the Linux partition at all.

I tried booting from a live USB and running yannubuntu boot-repair, it said it fixed something, but no dice. Tried to attempt manually fixing it with fdisk and grub-install directly to the broken sda, no luck.

Eventually dove in with GParted and got some somewhat useful information: It couldn't see anything at all in that partition, even to tell what filesystem it was using. Something, somewhere, got completely hosed. GRUB probably couldn't even tell it was a Linux partition.

I went back into the GRUB minimal interface and tried another couple of commands, and that gave me the best guess as to what happened I can think of: Secure Boot fucked up somewhere, somehow. But even disabling that wouldn't let me back into the partition.

Eventually, I gave up. I ended up needing the drive space more than I wanted to fight to get Ubuntu running on it again, especially with the risk that this could happen again, and the risk that I could completely hose my Windows partition if I kept fiddling with fixing it, so I spun up GParted again, wiped the Linux partition, and merged it back in with my main Windows partition. Everything's more or less as it should be, except now I just permanently have a recovery partition visible, even though it should be marked as hidden. I don't feel like going back into GParted to fix it again. I probably should, though.

So, what happened?

In that 4-month interim, Windows, as it is wont to do, fucked up. It managed to completely obliterate its own antivirus. As in, the entire Windows Defender thing was gone. Nary a registry key in sight. Malwarebytes seemed fine, no security alerts, so I don't think it was done by malware at least. Still have no idea how exactly it did this, or why, but I really did not want to go without it.

The only way to effectively restore this kind of Windows move is to do what they call an "upgrade in place", that essentially reinstalls the operating system while leaving user files and configurations alone as much as possible. Overall, it was a fairly painless process, and when it was done, Windows Defender was back and functioning again.

I'm fairly certain that this upgrade in place process broke something in GRUB, or in the Linux partition. I'm not entirely sure what broke, or why, or how. Windows 11 relies on Secure Boot, and the GRUB minimal interface mentioned something about Secure Boot during one of my recovery attempts. My best guess is that something in the upgrade in place did something with Secure Boot and thrashed any partitions it didn't recognize as "safe" or something. Wouldn't surprise me if that was the case.

I haven't really looked into dual booting again since this. If I do anything like this again, I want my Linux install to have its own separate SSD to run off of, so I don't have to deal with partitions or Windows bricking it again. I am still interested in running Linux, mostly in the interest of keeping myself familiar with it, or a least one flavor of it. One of my side projects that I've been putting off has been getting my old laptop to run Lubuntu, which it should on paper be able to do, since it ran both Linux Mint and regular Ubuntu acceptably, but it's struggling to even boot into the OS, so I'm a little worried there's a hardware failure looming in there. I hope not!