Follow-up from “Dumbest Thing you have done distro-hopping?”.
Here’s mine - the laptop from which I’m typing right now has a broken touchpad that keeps jumping and clicking randomly, and does not work. Well, I can’t afford to fix it, but at the moment, I was so pissed off I punched the touchpad really hard, and the machine panicked with all the lights blinking. A few more revival abuses, and the machine was back to life, but since I was running a nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade
in the background, I blew off my boot partition. I think I just broke the unbreakable distro.
I was installing Ubuntu for the first time on my laptop. My laptop had two hardisks, an SSD with Windows and a drive that I could switch out for a CD-rom drive by hand.
I decided to install Linux on the second drive. So I install, reboot, and Grub loads up…and tells me it cannot find the drive.
I eventually find the command fwsetup, which lets me boot into the BIOS again. Of course I don’t know what is going on, zo I just reboot and now it loads my Windows installation on the SSD.
So at least that is intact. I reboot again, and I’m stuck in the Grub bootloader again. The second drive just would not load properly to boot from it. Very annoying. I tried everything I could think of, everything I found on the Internet, it just would not boot the Linux drive.
In the end I just split my SSD and installed Linux next to Windows. I did split the second disk too, so my home directory is on the second disk and now everything works.
However, it’s a Toshiba laptop that gave me lots of trouble before with installing Windows before. I have decided that this is how it will run and I’m not messing with it again. The panic when I feel I broke it again is just not worth it.
That’s all fun and all until windows decides to wipe your Linux bootloader for no apparent reason
You are correct, but then Windows will get the boot entirely. It can stay as long as it behaves. It literally has it’s own fate in it’s hands.
And I know how to get the bootloader working again, so that will be just fine.