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Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if it's still happening, but for a while windows updates were helpfully "fixing" the EFI boot partition (or maybe it was a boot firmware thing, I never figured it out) by making windows primary and breaking my Linux entry .

My friends would be like "do you want to play games?" and I'd be like "yeah hang on while I make some boot media so I can recover afterwards."

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This bullshit still happens with the latest version of Windows 11. I found that I had to demote Windows Boot Manager to a lower position in my EFI boot order, whereas removing it completely from my boot order and removing the boot entry cause Windows to install itself as first priority the moment it booted. I have not tried retaining the boot entry (skipping efibootmgr -b0000 -B) but removing it from the boot order (efibootmgr -o 0001).

Yeah that smells like it. It's like excuse me, whose computer did you think this is?

Windows 10 updated my laptop's BIOS and in the process reset it to defaults. This basically bricked my laptop. Yeah I know how to go in and set a boot drive again, but not everyone should have to understand how that works.

This is 100% on your laptop manufacturer.

That's almost certainly your laptop manufacturer's fault. Dell pushes BIOS updates via Windows Update on a regular basis, and I've never had the settings reset because of said update. (source: I administer 80 Dell desktops, 40 Dell laptops, and 8 Dell servers)

However, I do feel your pain, I don't understand why other motherboard manufacturers don't save your existing BIOS settings. Asus and MSI, I'm looking at you all... why can't you just ask me instead of undoing my work?

Windows and GRUB will both compete for who gets to own \EFI\boot\bootx64.efi; but that file is only used when you tell your firmware "boot off this hard drive".

If Windows is removing another OS's entries from the boot list (displayed when you run 'efibootmgr -v' in Linux) then that's 100% deliberate anticompetitive behaviour from Microsoft; this list is where the entires like Windows, Fedora, and so on appear in the list of boot entries your firmware shows you.

This happened on my new PC. I dual-boot Ubuntu with grub2. After Windows update, it booted into Windows immediately and bypassed grub. The EFI had been "fixed".

I worked around this by installing Ubuntu on a second SSD, then I can use my bios menu to change the boot device.

SteamOS Linux does this too on Steamdeck, wiping out dual boot setups on updates.

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