Windows 10 wants to delete Linux – How do I stop it?

garyc

garyc

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I have a computer dual booting with Windows 10 and Linux. Each OS is on a separate drive, with the Linux drive formatted to ext4. When Win 10 is booted it comes up with a constant stream of requests to reformat the Linux drive, which is very distracting. Any Win 10 experts here who know how to make it stop doing this?
 
Simplest solution is to format the Win 10 partition. No more pesky boot messages.
 
Shaun108 said:
Simplest solution is to format the Win 10 partition. No more pesky boot messages.
Click to expand...

Very close to that solution right now since I don't use 10 that often.
 
In windows go to disk manager and unmount the drive? It should ignore it from then on (tbh though only ever had to mount a drive in the windows disk manager, never demount one).

Alternatively wipe the 10 drive and run a VM in Linux as the Windows 10 then allow hardware passthrough so you can play games?
 
Thanks, I will try dismounting it in disk manager. Hopefully this action can be made permanent.

The VM option may also be viable. Not playing any games on it so this should be relatively easy.
 
Go to disk manager and remove the drive letter assigned to it.
 
You need a boot manager. Just after IML and before the NT Executive loads Win checks all drives so it can load from Primary Active. If it finds two primary active system partitions it loads from the first enumerated and attempts to mark any others as inactive. This is an Intel architecture thing, not Windows. That's probably what's happening in your machine.
 
Last edited:
garyc said:
I have a computer dual booting with Windows 10 and Linux. Each OS is on a separate drive, with the Linux drive formatted to ext4. When Win 10 is booted it comes up with a constant stream of requests to reformat the Linux drive, which is very distracting. Any Win 10 experts here who know how to make it stop doing this?
Click to expand...

I would just go ahead and format the Linux partition. As an alternative you could right click the drive in disk management and set it's state to "Offline". Then win10 will not touch it.
 
You could try using a boot manager like EasyBCD from Neosmart technologies (Free) which will bring up a boot menu so that you can chose which system to boot. You can set it to a default boot with a 5 second delay to choose the alternate system. I have used this to boot to different windows OS's on separate drives, but not sure if it will work in a Windows/Linux setup.
 
joevan said:
You could try using a boot manager like EasyBCD from Neosmart technologies (Free) which will bring up a boot menu so that you can chose which system to boot. You can set it to a default boot with a 5 second delay to choose the alternate system. I have used this to boot to different windows OS's on separate drives, but not sure if it will work in a Windows/Linux setup.
Click to expand...

No the problem is not the boot manager, it's that windows can see the drive, which is why setting it to offline will fix the problem.
 
mister said:
I would just go ahead and format the Linux partition. As an alternative you could right click the drive in disk management and set it's state to "Offline". Then win10 will not touch it.
Click to expand...
^This. Removing drive letter is not sufficient.
 
I still suspect the problem is you have more than one primary active system partition, which is not supported on Intel architectures.

You can have up to four primary partitions, but only one can be active. Your Windows ptn is probably the first enumerated, so it executes the MBR and when done rightly tries to mark the other(s) as inactive and then reformat.

If you have a UEFI mobo, install Win10 in UEFI mode.

Or get a boot manager.
 
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