I am a Linux beginner but I really enjoyed it so far. So far. Since yesterday, my Linux (pop OS) only wants to boot into emergency mode. I have a suspicion, even though my Linux and Windows are located on different physical disks, somehow Windows does it’s toxic ex lover things and somehow broke my Linux I assume. It’s there a terminal command to somehow reorganise my boot files?
@just_another_person @Rubanski On most modern systems neither Windows nor Linux is going to hurt each other’s boot record because usually on a dual boot system you’re going to launch grub out of the boot block which is going to them find and mount the UEFI partition which is a fat-32 partition usually mounted on /boot/efi by Linux, and then grub is going to continue from a directory within /boot/efi, windows similarly will have a directory there, and grub if it finds both will present a menu at boot. Since both use separate directories on this UEFI System partition, one should not interfere with the other unless the partition is too small and you run out of disk space. I usually size my EFI partition at 512MB and that’s always been more than sufficient for multiple operating systems. If you re-install WIndows, it will overwrite the boot block with it’s own boot loader, but restoring it with grub will you back to where you were. If you are a real glutton for punishment, you can setup the Windows boot loader to chain load grub, this works as I have actually done it, more as a matter of curiosity than anything else. But I prefer to use Grub as the first boot loader as it’s faster and less prone to exploding.
While I agree with your assertion in theory, I cannot agree that windows doesn’t mess with grub. I have had 5 different issues with grub being overwritten, 1 was because windows and Linux were on the same drive, but the other 4 was simply because I launched windows through grub.
My advice for people dual booting is to never launch windows through grub and instead change your boot order in bios, this has made all of my boot related issues go away.
@Attacker94 The boot block pointing to grub is what gets overwritten, grub itself in /boot/efi doesn’t. You can fix either though with either boot repair or boot from a usb thumb drive, mount the partitions on /mnt and subdirectories,mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev, /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts, and then mount --rbind /proc /mnt/proc and /sys /mnt/sys, cp /etc/resolv.conf to /mnt/etc/resolv.conf, chroot to /mnt, and then grub-install /dev/sda or whatever the drive is. Not a big deal. And this only happens if you install Windows AFTER you have installed Linux.
Thank you, I was aware of this, but I believe you are mistaken in your last sentence because Linux has always been the second one to be installed for me and the issue still crops up when I forget to heed my own advice