Posted: 9/6/2025 6:36:20 PM EDT
[Last Edit: David0858][Edited]
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About two months ago I wiped my Win 10 LTSC 2021 for reasons and installed Win 10 IOT LTSC. This computer had three drives, one with Windows, one with Mint Linux and one data drive. When I had installed Win 10 IOT LTSC I had booted an install USB drive, deleted all the Windows drive partitions with the installer and installed to that now bare and unpartitioned drive. Everything installed with no problem, I got everything set up just like I like and things were good. Fast forward to a few days go and I decided I needed more storage space on this computer and since Linux doesn't like this computer and I haven't been using it, I got a bigger NVME drive (linux was on the second NVME drive, the data drive was a 2 1/2" SSD) and replaced the lInux drive with it. Fedex brought me my drive, I replaced the Linux drive with it, hooked everything back up, turned the computer on and no boot device found. WTF!! I hadn't touched the Windows drive I had been booting and using for two months. Whenever I had used Linux I had used the boot menu on startup and booted Linux from there. I finally ended up booting with a live Mint usb and used Gparted to see if I could see what was wrong. There was only the Windows partition on the Windows drive and not the boot partition and the other one it always installs. I put the removed linux drive in an external usb case and plugged it into a usb port and booted Mint again to look at it. Windows booted like normal.  I rebooted, picked the USB drive from the boot selection menu and got back into Gparted. The only boot anything was on the linux drive so it had booted Windows with the boot partition on the Linux drive in the USB case. I thought about shrinking the Windows partition and copying the boot partition from the linux drive to it but I really didn't want to screw with the Windows install unless I had to. I booted up a Macrium USB and copied the boot partition from the linux drive to the then unpartitioned new drive. It then booted Windows right with no further problems just like it had when the linux drive was there.Why and how did the Windows install use the linux boot partition instead of making it's own like always? This wasn't a dual boot deal either, it had always just booted to Windows, it had never ask anything. Whenever I had wanted to use Mint I had to go to the boot menu and chose the linux drive (evidently using the same boot partition Windows was using) and it booted straight to linux. ???? I don't get it. |
But he sure found out the hard way
That dreams don't always come true
That dreams don't always come true
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Does this system use UEFI? All kinds of crazy things can happen there, since there's variables stored in NVRAM that's independent of the disks and OS installed. I could easily see Windows just updating UEFI settings if there was already a UEFI boot partition in place. |
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Originally Posted By seek2: Does this system use UEFI? All kinds of crazy things can happen there, since there's variables stored in NVRAM that's independent of the disks and OS installed. I could easily see Windows just updating UEFI settings if there was already a UEFI boot partition in place. Yeah, I'm sure it uses UEFI as I never changed the MB settings for it. |
But he sure found out the hard way
That dreams don't always come true
That dreams don't always come true
|
OK, that pretty much guarantees what happened. You can run efibootmgr from linux and see what it's showing. The first thing I do on a new PC is pull the windows NVME drive and put in a new one with linux, and pretty much every PC I have still shows Windows Boot Manager as the first entry under efibootmgr even though it literally does not exist on the system. Unless you go around deleting EFI stuff (something I do not recommend) Windows doing stuff like you describe would be normal. |