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4 ways Windows is trying to sabotage your Linux dual-boot
Quoting: 4 ways Windows is trying to sabotage your Linux dual-boot —
Windows has never been polite about sharing a disk. Most of the time, it doesn't need to, so it can afford to be annoying with the few users that do. The most common way it breaks a dual-boot setup is by taking back control of the boot process. On UEFI systems, both operating systems keep their bootloaders on the EFI system partition, and the firmware picks which one to launch based on a boot order stored in NVRAM.
Major Windows feature updates, repair operations, or a fresh reinstall can rewrite that order and put Windows Boot Manager back in first place. GRUB usually isn't deleted, but the next restart skips your menu and drops you straight into Windows, leaving many people convinced that Linux has vanished. On older BIOS machines with MBR partitioning, the situation is worse, because the Windows installer writes its own code to the master boot record and erases GRUB outright.
The fix is simple once you know what happened. Boot a Linux live USB, mount your installed system, and reinstall the bootloader with grub-install followed by update-grub, or use efibootmgr to move the Linux entry back to the top. The catch is that you need that USB stick on hand, and if Windows is the only system that boots, you may not have one ready.