Windows can automount USB drives, so a flash drive can get inadvertently formatted, (or something to do with the bootloader, i don’t know the technical details that well.) Point is the automounting can break a flash drive that isn’t formatted for windows.
They do what to boot drives?
ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
DupaCycki@lemmy.world 6 days ago
If you’re dual booting, Windows may at any time eat the other partition or, more often just its GRUB, leaving you unable to boot into Linux.
Even if you’re using separate drives, the Windows bootloader may still affect your other drives. On one of my old laptops, I had Pop!_OS and Windows on two separate SSDs. After installing Windows on the second drive, it put itself as the first boot device and broke the option to change boot order inside the BIOS. It worked, but only sometimes, and Windows would keep setting itself to the top upon every boot. Might not have been intrinsically a Windows issue, but never happened with other configurations.
rami@ani.social 6 days ago
I’m trying to move to Linux so that’s terrifying.