Upgrading Windows on a dual boot installation

[phil1349]

My desktop was originally purchased as a Windows 10 machine on which I installed Kubuntu (and Mint) without a problem. Now Windows are suggesting "upgrading" to Windows 11 I am a bit concerned that the upgrade will assume that windows is the only game in town and re-write the efi partition and effectively trash the Linux installations which I do not want.

If it is going to be a problem then I will probably not bother as I rarely use windows anyway so if anyone has experience of this I would be grateful for your comments.

[Fred47]

Can't say for sure, but expect it to wipe out your linux boot. Windows doesn't recognize any partitions except their own so your linux data will be okay. It's just that your boot record will be wiped off. On my HP laptop, this is part of the bios, that ordinary folks like me are not allowed to edit. So basically reinsall linux. This happened to me twice, so now my windows is on a older Dell that I pull out once a year to do my taxes. I'm hoping it's old enough Windows won't force it to 11.

[claydoh]

I can't attest to upgrading to W11, but I have upgraded to w10, on a few multiboot systems that had Windows 7, with no issue, other than Windows resetting the boot order in the bios. This sometimes happens after normal Windows OS updates as well, at least for me.

If you are worried, then wait until others have done so, and see how they have fared. I suspect things will be fine overall, but there is no real need to get 11 at the moment, especially if you don't really use it often. I may, if offered, but I have not seen such a suggestion or prompt when I updated my seldom-used Windows install over the weekend. But that is on a separate drive altogether.

[GreyGeek]

If you are not using Win10 all that much you probably won't use Win11 much more either.

So, you are at the crossroads I was at several years ago. I had been booting into my windows side once every 3 or 4 months or so just to do the upgrades. The last time I did that over 100,000 kb's came down the pipe and it took several boots and hours to finish. I asked myself why I was putting up with this since a rarely use Windows? That's when I reclaimed the HD space Windows was using and gave it to Kubuntu. Never had a reason to regret it. The three windows programs I did run installed and ran perfectly well under WINE on Kubuntu.

[GreyGeek]

BUT, if you persist in wanting to dual boot with Win10 here is a YT video which I just saw that explains how:

[Avi512]

Well, I had a dual boot as well with Win 10 and Kubuntu 21.04.
I upgraded to Windows 11 - and it did not override anything or destroyed my grub.
Mind you, it too my laptop over 10 hours to upgrade.
On the next day, I upgraded to Kubuntu 21.10 in under 2 hours.

[phil1349]

My thanks to all those who replied, My system is performing very well at present so I do not want to disturb it even though Avi512 upgraded successfully. Maybe I will try WINE again, I tried it a few years ago and it worked up to a point but the typefaces and fonts were all over the place and made it unusable. I did not have the patience at the time to sort it out.