I thought I was safe from this if I installed windows on a completely separate harddrive… I clearly overestimated Microsoft’s ability to make on operating system that does not act like literal malware. Oh well! I guess I’m 100% linux now.
You likely have secure boot and a Microsoft package key installed in UEFI. They likely did what they are supposed to do and removed the unsigned software.
You must either sign your own UEFI keys using the options in your bootloader that may or may not be present, or you must use a distro that has the m$ signed secure boot shim key. These are the only ways for both m$ and Linux to coexist. Indeed, with a shim key (Fedora/Ubuntu) you can easily have a windows partition on the same drive without issues.
Secure boot is a scheme to steal hardware ownership. Of course they say it is not because the standard specifies a mechanism to sign your own keys. However the standard specification is only a guideline and most consumer grade implementations do not allow custom key generation and signing.
If you need to do your own keys, search for the US defense department’s guide on the subject. It is by far the most comprehensive explanation of the system and how to set it up correctly. They have a big motivation to prevent corporate data stalking type nonsense and make this kind of documentation accessible publicly.
If your bootloader does not allow custom keys, there is a little known tool called Keytool that allows you to boot directly into UEFI and supposedly change the keys regardless of the implemented utility in the bootloader. I have never tried this myself. The only documentation I have found was from Gentoo, but their documentation assumes a very high level of competence.
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Windows went a step further on my machine. I thought it had just screwed up my bootloader, but when I went to restore it my Linux partition was completely gone. Windows Update had deleted the partition.
Malware is right.
Not having to ever touch Windows again has made my life infinitely better. I can handle setting it up for a buddy on their new PC I’ll build. Getting to build a new PC is worth it. These fools don’t even realize how much I enjoy building their PCs. They don’t even charge me for it.
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fTPM (hardware TPMs should be considered compromised at this point)
Interesting. Could you elaborate on that?
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UEFI or legacy BIOS? I recently installed Windows 11 on a machine with Proxmox on NVME but installed Windows on a SATA SSD. Windows added its boot entry to the NVME SSD but did not get rid of the Proxmox boot entry.
I’ve definitely had the same issue as you on in the past on legacy BIOS and when I worked in a computer shop 2014-2015 we always removed any extra drives before installing Windows to avoid this issue (not like the other drives had an OS anyway).
… may I ask what is your use case to install Wins alongside Proxmox (instead of in VM)?
In just curious & will prob learn something :).
It’s a gaming machine. I mainly use a gaming VM with GPU passthrough under Proxmox, but the anti-cheat is some games (Fortnite and The Finals) don’t allow you to run them in VMs. So I run those games in Windows directly under a standard user account as a compromise.
Ohh, interesting.
Also kinda dickish of them.
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