| > What issues do they cause? Really? Biggest one by far is the super-ambiguous "boot failed" with nothing else while trying to get back into windows after turning off Fastboot (see step 7 in my other post). Once you've got that, you can fix it for the next boot with bootrec /FixBoot & /RebuildBCD, but it'll keep coming back every time its restarted. Only failsafe fix I've ever found that keeps it from coming back is to move everything, including GRUB itself, onto separate disks. At that point it cooperates, at least until Windows thoughtfully turns FastBoot on for you again. A close second is secureboot's "invalid signature detected". You get the same message when you try to chainload off a non-present drive or one that isn't bootable, but if you make the non-booting disk the only one, suddenly it'll start working again. Usually a grub2 reprobe/reinstall will fix this, but its really annoying. The dual-OS desktops at work all get this upon reboot whenever we lose power. > Clearly annoying, but easily fixed. Sure, until it resets itself at the next update, suddenly won't work when you turn it back off and you have to do everything all over again... > I'd rather have this once a year than Windows deciding it has the right to write to my MBR, and overwrite GRUB, causing my Linux installation to be unbootable without a recovery-disk. Only there's no risk of your linux installation being completely hosed in this scenario, like there is for the Windows environment with UEFI thrown in. Instead of starting over from scratch/backups, you just have to mount your drives, re-probe and install GRUB. That takes maybe a few minutes. Also, in a multi-volume system it can be completely avoided by disconnecting your dedicated GRUB disk for windows updates; the same can't save you from Windows declaring itself king of the computer and suddenly turning on UEFI settings that you don't want. > That may be true for multi-volume scenarios. For systems with one volume only however (like most laptops), it's absolute the opposite. Its worse on single-volume scenarios, since you can get completely screwed. In a multi-volume environment, UEFI's fragility is somewhat compensated for by the fact you can boot off the boot sectors of the individual drives when it breaks. > My experience is quite the opposite. With UEFI I feel I can fearlessly dual/multi boot several operating systems without fear that one OS is going to mess up another one. Huh. Yeah, that's ... pretty much the exact opposite of the experience I and everyone I know has had. You're honestly the first person I've seen that's been a fan. |
At first I tried to force all OSes to use the same EFI partition (because why should they need different ones?), and yes, I now recall having some issues back then.
After that I tried to let Windows have it’s own EFI partition. That was also the default setup created when installing Windows last, so it really didn’t take any effort.
And that has worked flawlessly for me. You may want to give it a shot.
Cheers.