Microsoft is testing its own CCleaner alternative

[Ben Myers]

Sounds like a waste of time worrying about what could happen.

Waste of time? I have dealt with Windows for many, many years, and I have seen it grow in complexity ever since Windows 2000. My job is to fix those Windows computers that break, so I've seen it all, or maybe only 99% of it all. In particular, the Windows registry is a bloated and poorly documented monstrosity. It's not what could happen. It's what DOES HAPPEN every day.

 

[hahahanoobs]

Waste of time? I have dealt with Windows for many, many years, and I have seen it grow in complexity ever since Windows 2000. My job is to fix those Windows computers that break, so I've seen it all, or maybe only 99% of it all. In particular, the Windows registry is a bloated and poorly documented monstrosity. It's not what could happen. It's what DOES HAPPEN every day.

Don't assume I'm not as experienced. Makes it more of a waste of time than this already is.

 

[wiyosaya]

What real kills dual boot is UEFI and secure boot for me. Not a simple task to backup/restore UEFI/GPT disks, at least not that simple as BIOS/MBR days.

Try this - https://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-linux/ Granted, you have to pay for it, but for individuals, their licensing agreement lets you use it on up to 5-PCs.

As for partition work, they also have this - https://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-bare-metal/ and a UEFI version of the same - https://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-uefi/

Both of these, IMO, are well worth the money. They have no problems doing an image backup of UEFI/GPT disks.

EDIT: No, I don't work for them. I have, however, used their software for years and I have never had problems with it.

In fact, I used the Boot-it Bare Metal to convert an mbr disk to a GPT disk, and then converted that system from BIOS boot to UEFI. Awesome tools, I cannot recommend them enough.

 

[wiyosaya]

My recent experience on dealing with a, (very old), dual boot machine, (Win 7 & Ubuntu), is that the GRUB boot loader is extremely invasive, and somehow, trashes the BIOS.

I deleted the Linux & Grub partitions (granted, a risky maneuver). I actually knew better, but wasn't thinking clearly. To pay for my mistake, a reinstall was mandatory..

However, whenever I try to do a setting in BIOS, the machine goes back to looking for the Linux boot loader, and blows up an, "entering grub rescue", message. No grub to find, no booting for me.

Luckily, the Windows repair function solved the issue, the turd boots now. However I'm stuck on "fail safe defaults in BIOS", which are far from ideal. (Wrong multiplier, too low, with the CPU running at 2.27 Ghz, instead of rated 2.8 Ghz).

Luckily I was able to convince it to boot from CD 1st, which enabled Windows to repair itself from the DVD.

To make a two day long story a bit shorter, no more "novelty" Linux installs, ever

@captaincranky I have to say that your experience with GRUB does not match mine. Of course, there is a difference in that my preferred Linux distro is not the "everyone uses Unbuntu" distro - but openSuSE. The required plug for openSuSE. It's great. I would not use anything else - I've been using it for years, and my gateway/firewall/router/DNS/NTP/Samba server is running it and has been for at least 10-years now with few problems and those problems were easily solved by asking the openSuSE community.

Aside from that, I have a similarly configured laptop Windows 7 home upgraded to Windows 10 Pro dual booting openSuSE Leap with GRUB as the boot loader. If GRUB were corrupting the bios, I would think that the open source community would have raised holy hell as that would be a mortal sin in the open source community, and I have never experienced any problems with the bios on that PC other than what I detail below.

As I mentioned in my above post, I use an image backup program that is on a bootable USB stick. I also use that on my Wife's laptop. Both of our laptops were running Windows 7 at some point, and we regularly (maybe once a year or so) updated them to the latest Windohs 7 update.

To use the USB stick on both laptops, we went into the bios to change the boot order to the USB stick first. We noted that in general, after a Windohs 7 update, that the Windohs 7 update modified the bios so that IT, Windohs 7, booted first no matter what the boot order was. Remember, M$ knows better than you and I how we _should_ use our computers. So, I highly suspect that it was Windohs that F'd up your bios.

Side note - I P&M'd big time to M$ about this, and it appears that the latest versions of Windohs update no longer do this.

I assume you've tried the bios option - reset all options to default - assuming your bios has that?

HTH - Cheers.