Back when I used to dual-boot, I had Windows on its own drive just for when it gets these ideas in its head.
Had a slightly similar - but also very different - experience that finally weaned me off of dual-booting though.
Back when Windows 10 was releasing their “fall update”, something had broken in the updating procedure and Windows would - on every reboot - attempt to install said update and then fail and roll it back.
At least until it at one point suddenly “succeeded” in installing the update.
The updater took ages to run, and then when it finally rebooted the entire drive was just gone. Partition table was still there, but messed up. Partitions were still there, but contained garbage in their superblocks. Even the EFI binaries were trashed, and the Windows setup couldn’t recognize it as a valid Windows install to attempt recovery on.
I ended up taking a block-level copy of the entire drive from Linux, ran a bunch of file restore tools on that to try and recover what little data I had stored on the Windows drive itself, to some success. And at that point I was long past fed up with the mess that was running a Windows desktop, so it was also the last time I’ve ever had Windows installed on physical hardware - though I have had to load up VMs to run a couple of horribly written hardware OEM tools since.
Back when I used to dual-boot, I had Windows on its own drive just for when it gets these ideas in its head.
Had a slightly similar - but also very different - experience that finally weaned me off of dual-booting though.
Back when Windows 10 was releasing their “fall update”, something had broken in the updating procedure and Windows would - on every reboot - attempt to install said update and then fail and roll it back.
At least until it at one point suddenly “succeeded” in installing the update.
The updater took ages to run, and then when it finally rebooted the entire drive was just gone. Partition table was still there, but messed up. Partitions were still there, but contained garbage in their superblocks. Even the EFI binaries were trashed, and the Windows setup couldn’t recognize it as a valid Windows install to attempt recovery on.
I ended up taking a block-level copy of the entire drive from Linux, ran a bunch of file restore tools on that to try and recover what little data I had stored on the Windows drive itself, to some success. And at that point I was long past fed up with the mess that was running a Windows desktop, so it was also the last time I’ve ever had Windows installed on physical hardware - though I have had to load up VMs to run a couple of horribly written hardware OEM tools since.