Linux user needs help with Windows choice

[XZillA]

Hey! Im a long time Linux user, and have some experience with windows. Have dual booted once and my school laptop. Both Windows 10.

The reason I stopped dual booting was that Windows started f*cking up the rest of my hard drives, got one ssd and 4 hdd's. All of them are ext4 file systems which windows doesn't support. My torrent client had to recheck all files when going back to Linux, it would take more than 30min with disk reading maxed out made it unusable during that time.

The other thing was the Windows would never fully shutdown, it would save some fast boot thingy on the drive which prevented me to mount it when running Linux. Only solution was to use CMD to fully shutdown. So I wiped the drive and went to fully Linux again.

 

6 months later and god I miss some games that wont run in Linux or Wine. I need your help with all Windows stuff. Which Windows should I choose? Can I "hide" rest of my drives to windows without physically disconnect them? All I will use windows for is Steam/Origin and TeamSpeak.

[Electronics Wizardy]

9 minutes ago, XZillA said:

The other thing was the Windows would never fully shutdown, it would save some fast boot thingy on the drive which prevented me to mount it when running Linux

you can disable it.

 

9 minutes ago, XZillA said:

Which Windows should I choose?

Id go 7 or 2012 r2 personally

 

 

How about running it in a vm.

 

If you want to keep the partitions seprate encrypt them.

[TAHIRMIA]

Some videos that may help you:

Spoiler

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

[J400]

i went from linux to windows 7 and i have to say that 7 is much easier to get into than 10 is. the command prompt in 7 is much easier to access as well as the task manager. the UI for 7 is much more familiar to ubuntu or fedora if you have ever tried them. i would recommend 7 personally, but the choice is all yours. i don't know if there is a way to block access to drives from an operating system (I have never tried) but my father is an expert in software so i could ask him about it.

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 minutes ago, J400 said:

. i don't know if there is a way to block access to drives from an operating system

yep you can. 

[XZillA]

10 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

you can disable it.

I tried both in controlpanel(I think) and in regedit. Non worked. CMD each time was only solution.

10 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

If you want to keep the partitions seprate encrypt them.

Cant encrypt entire drive without loosing data. Only way that I know about would be encrypting just the files, would that be enough?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, XZillA said:

Cant encrypt entire drive without loosing data.

Id personally encrypt all drives with LUKS then run LVM in there.

[manikyath]

depending on what you need windows for, there's a variety of solutions here.

 

some suggestions

- regular ol' VM

- VM with GPU passtrough (advanced)

- dual boot normally, and figure out the garbage

- seperate (low power?) machine

- ...

 

i do really recommed to try and figure out win10, mostly just to stay recent, as a comparison, you'd be running ubuntu 10.04 in an ubuntu 16.10 era when going for windows 7

[XZillA]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

depending on what you need windows for, there's a variety of solutions here.

 

some suggestions

- regular ol' VM

- VM with GPU passtrough (advanced)

- dual boot normally, and figure out the garbage

- seperate (low power?) machine

- ...

 

i do really recommed to try and figure out win10, mostly just to stay recent, as a comparison, you'd be running ubuntu 10.04 in an ubuntu 16.10 era when going for windows 7

GPU passtrough sounds interesting. Will look into that

[manikyath]

3 minutes ago, XZillA said:

GPU passtrough sounds interesting. Will look into that

look into level1techs on youtube, wendell really likes his GPU passtrough, back when they were still under the teksyndicate banner he made a linux box that had a windows install with steam running in the background, to "steam in-home stream" to the linux OS

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 minutes ago, manikyath said:

i do really recommed to try and figure out win10

but man its annoying. They really messed some stuff up. For example

 

alt menus and tab for next box in setup. 

 

Not being able to disable updates.

 

inconsistant UI.

 

settings + control panel

 

 

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

but man its annoying. They really messed some stuff up. For example

 

alt menus and tab for next box in setup. 

 

Not being able to disable updates.

 

inconsistant UI.

 

settings + control panel

 

 

my win10 upgrade turned into a win9 upgrade because grub screwed over half of it and it didnt tell me.

 

so i had the UI of 10, with the backend of 8.1

 

needless to say every piece of software that had different backends for 8.1 and 10 (including GPU driver) got quite confused on that one.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

my win10 upgrade turned into a win9 upgrade because grub screwed over half of it and it didnt tell me.

 

so i had the UI of 10, with the backend of 8.1

 

needless to say every piece of software that had different backends for 8.1 and 10 (including GPU driver) got quite confused on that one.

for windows, im sticking with win 7 or 2008r2 until i can't use it, then switiching to linux if i can, or mac.

[manikyath]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

for windows, im sticking with win 7 or 2008r2 until i can't use it, then switiching to linux if i can, or mac.

you're well aware you're like those winxp folks right?

 

i'd gladly be on linux tomorrow, but until linux stops going selfdestruct on me, that's nothing but a dream.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

you're well aware you're like those winxp folks right?

Yep. I like it and im not changing.

 

 

[XZillA]

12 minutes ago, manikyath said:

look into level1techs on youtube, wendell really likes his GPU passtrough, back when they were still under the teksyndicate banner he made a linux box that had a windows install with steam running in the background, to "steam in-home stream" to the linux OS

Do you think my i5 4690k integrated graphics are enough? I only have one dedicated GPU.

Also my mtb is not listed here. Is that mean PCI passtough out of the picture? Its a GB Z97P-D3

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, XZillA said:

Do you think my i5 4690k integrated graphics are enough? I only have one dedicated GPU.

Also my mtb is not listed here. Is that mean PCI passtough out of the picture? Its a GB Z97P-D3

thats why gpu passtrogh was listed as "advanced", because it's a female dog to figure out, and you need very specific hardware to do it (properly)

[XZillA]

OK, I'm currently installing W10 on my smallest HDD. When I looked in the UEFI I saw that I could disable each SATA port. If I avoid having to mount the windows partition in Linux things should work out

[XZillA]

Great. Windows only identified the usb drive and the intended hdd. Installed drivers and stuff. Realized that I forgot that I need a file thats on my Linux home drive. I reboot and select all SATA ports to be enabled, chose my ssd as boot drive.

You mother f*ucker! Windows still overwrote my SSD's boot partition. 

Writing arch live iso to my usb drive to reinstall Syslinux form my laptop.

Is it so difficult to identify another operating system already installed...

Edited January 7, 2017 by XZillA
syslinux, not grub