I've heard conflicting things about dual booting with Windows and Linux, particularly the risk of Windows potentially overwriting my Linux partition. I'm currently using Windows 10 and I want to make sure that doesn't happen. I've done some research on how to prevent EFI from being overwritten, but the information I've found isn't very clear. By the way, I'm looking to dual boot because I want to play some games with friends that are only available on Windows, but I also want to keep my Linux setup intact.
3 Answers
From what I've learned, if you're dual booting from a single disk, Windows will share the EFI boot partition with Linux and could overwrite GRUB. To prevent this, consider installing Linux on a second drive. If that's not possible, make sure to manually create your partitions during the installation, including at least a 200MB EFI/boot partition and the rest as your root partition. Windows won’t touch GRUB in this scenario.
If Windows and Linux are installed on the same drive, there's a chance Windows might overwrite the GRUB bootloader. Fortunately, if that happens, you can pretty easily repair it. However, if you can, it's better to install Windows and Linux on separate SSDs or HDDs to avoid this issue completely.
Just a heads up, a lot of installers for dual booting tend to default to using the EFI partition of the primary disk, even if you have multiple drives. So, if you go this route, make sure to set your partitions manually to avoid any trouble.
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