So my Aurora based Asus Flow Z13 2025 is rocking along nicely. I have a small windows partition (and their associated ‘recovery’ partition) which I boot into occasionally for firmware updates and such.
Alas, something has gotten corrupted in some critical C:/Windows early boot DLL (I think this happened because I just asked windows to deinstall McAfee bloatware). Now my windows boot crashes very early and says I need to do auto repair.
Anyone happen to know if I do run their repair: Will it mess with my linux partitions? Will it blow away the GRUB bootloader and reinstall their own? If so - is there any recommended way to limit the chaos?
It won’t touch linux partitions, and it shouldn’t touch foreign files on EFI partition. It will reorder boot records, but that is fixable either from BIOS or through efibootmgr/EFIShell.
In case of some freak accident, you can back up your EFI partition (/boot/efi).
…A bit of clarification of EFI partition. Due to wonders of modern engineering, EFI partition is just a small partition, usually FAT32 formatted, that contains folder EFI with subfolders for all different bootloaders you’re using. Any new system just creates folder alongside all others, plops their bootloader into it and writes boot record pointing at it.
One exception is EFI/BOOT which contains default fallback bootloader (usually small file that links to actual executable), that one is often rewritten. Though this is legacy stuff for old motherboards.
