this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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If using efi (instead of bios), set up a second efi boot partition. Use one efi for windows and the second for Linux. It's "non standard" but the efi spec does not explicitly forbid you having multiple partitions, and it will keep windows from disabling anything on the Linux boot partition.
This may or may not work. Recognizing a second ESP on the same disk is not required in the EFI standard. So it's down to your board's implementation if it works or just stops the moment it finds the first one.
Whereas I agree that it's not guaranteed to work, I have set up more then a dozen systems this way and have never had it be an issue.
Honestly I have no clue how many EFI implementations actually fail there. Maybe it's indeed a minor fraction. But I have personally seen two different ones (out of about a dozen -mostly laptops a few years old- systems where I tried it) and that's enough to consider it a problem. (PS: Probably not conicidently one of those also had a broken SecureBoot implementation that rejected all key changes and only worked with the pre-installed MS ones. Maybe I'm simply good at finding the trashy ones.)
I have had a bad history with this. The windows partion constantly (noticed the competition and) overwrote the bootloader when it updated. With separate drives for both OS I no longer have this problem.
A second drive is optimal, but you should still have a second efi partition on the second drive.
i don't recommend doing this. it's only going to cause issues with not much (any?) gain.
I've done it with over a dozen computers by different manufacturers: primarily laptops: Lenovo, HP, toshiba, and I have yet to run into any issue.
Windows assumes there is only ever going to be one efi, so it totally ignores the second partition. Linux has you mount the efi partition so you can choose it over the windows one.
What problems have you had with it? There is lots of advice out there on the Internet saying this is the best setup, not just me.
have tried to do this once after seeing it somewhere, my motherboard firmware couldn't boot from the second efi partition and only recognized the first partition. (i believe this was a gigabyte motherboard but not too sure)