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Yesterday I formatted my laptop and installed first Windows 10 and then Debian stable.

I made a super simple setup with a 180 GB partition for Windows, leaving ~60 GB free to install Debian.

The Windows 10 installation did its usual windows-installation business and created the various small partitions it needed by itself (MSR, EFI etc...).

For Debian I just assigned 5 GB for swap space, and allowed Debian to use the rest for the normal one-partition-installation.

Everything worked excellent in both Debian and Windows. I was able to boot into both systems without any trouble through GRUB, so I went on and installed some of the usual developer tools I need in Windows and Debian.

However, today when I attempted to boot into Windows 10, the windows boot process seemed to kill itself and the laptop restart. This went on a couple of times (...restart, select windows in GRUB menu, boot-attempt, restart... repeat). After three or four times I was prompted with some Windows 10 rescue screen. There was an option to "repair boot record" (or something like that), but that failed, so I ended up choosing an option to reinstall Windows 10.

Everything works fine now, however now I have to perform a lot of time consuming installations again -_-.

So now I wonder how to prevent this from happening in the future.. Is there something special I should do for the installation process of the operating systems?.. Is there some way to 'repair' a dual boot with a Windows 10 partition that refuses to boot up?

I've done many dual boot installations previously with Win7-8/Linux, and haven't really encountered similar problems before.

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Disable "fast startup" in Windows 10.

Power options => Choose what the power button does => Change settings that are currently unavailable => Uncheck "Turn on fast startup".

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  • encountered the same problem once again after a windows update. Even with "fast startup" disabled. However this time I tried windows system restore, and after many attempts (like 6 or so) it magically worked and restored my system. But now a lot of a lot of applications are broken again (including all metro apps).. This is too unpredictable and risky, so I think I will just give up and live with windows only and a gimped virtual machine for Linux :(
    – user189814
    Sep 18, 2015 at 11:59
  • Which update of Windows 10 - are you on fast channel? Check again if fast startup is really disabled as Windows 10 update to next version changes the setting. Another possibility is that some utility when in Debian is writing to Windows partition ? You can use a separate data partition for common Windows and Debian access so Windows OS would not be accessed from Debian.
    – snayob
    Sep 18, 2015 at 12:17
  • Maybe you are right that "fast startup" was re-enabled again by windows update (I didn't check after the update). I am very sure Debian doesn't touch the windows partition, unless there is something special going on with this EFI partition (I don't think I have any past experience with EFI partitions.. or maybe I just happen notice it this time at installation).
    – user189814
    Sep 18, 2015 at 13:26
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    EFI system partition is ok for access from any Linux, Windows, etc. Its a common place for boot files. Every OS should store its boot files under a special folder e.g. \Microsoft, \Debian, \Fedora, \Ubuntu ...this removes the limit of MBR code! And we have a common firmware boot manager.
    – snayob
    Sep 18, 2015 at 13:41

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