Installing Windows and Linux into the same partition

idea.md

Installing Windows and Linux into the same partition

But WHY?

There was a reddit post about installing Arch on NTFS3 partition. Since Windows and Linux doesn't have directories with same names under the /(C:\), I thought it's possible, and turned out it was actually possible.
If you are not familiar to Linux, for example you've searched on Google "how to dualboot Linux and Windos" or brbrbr... you mustn't try this. This is not practical.

Pre-requirements

• UEFI system
• Any Linux live-boot CD/DVD/USB... with Linux kernel newer than 5.15
• Windows installer USB

How-to

1. Boot up Linux and create a EFI system partition. 1GB is enough (512MB may not be)
2. Boot up Windows and normally install it. You may need to choose "Custom: Install Windows only" option.
3. When finished, boot up Linux install USB and mount the NTFS partition Windows created. Note you need to specify -t ntfs3 on mount.
4. Mount EFI partition and other needed ones (like swaps) and continue installing.
5. Don't forget to "Add rootfstype=ntfs3 as kernel parameter"
6. Done!

Known issues

• ldconfig crashes for me, using Arch.
• sometimes kernel panics on poweroff.
• the pioneer says "the system will break after a few boots"

@p0358

corrupted the filesystem beyond saving

There is no saving on linux. we do not have a fsck tool for linux. If the filesystem is in an unclean state you can consider it broken, Windows chkdsk is at this point only partial helpful. If checks for the Microsoft Windows NTFS implementation, that might be slightly different from the linux/paragon one and might not fix the linux implementation. Do not reset, but always properly unmount/shut down. This is not on NTFS3, but on you ;)

NTFS3 works very well for noncritical partitions. It's still a very young implementation and NTFS itself is a huge thing with many feature linux cant support/emulate. If you hit a bug, report it upstream and help to fix it. This is how you'll make it better. But yeah, in the end - it's not nearly "production ready", but a nice tool to have fun.

This is not on NTFS3, but on you ;)

I cannot agree with this, that's just shrugging off the responsibility for broken code towards the user. While systems crashing to various reasons are simple inevitability over a course of time. While here it appears that just one such occurence always trashes your partition. And journaling file systems are designed specifically to guard against such situations, and I've never personally witnessed any system crash ever causing anything remotely similar to this.

Defending an implementation that does this, is basically defending a ticking bomb, where its contents will be lost eventually. I kinda fail to see how that's too useful, save from maybe a partition purely and exclusively for stuff like games, or symlink for npm modules store, basically only stuff that you can easily re-download intact (don't tell me about backups, as inevitably in such case I feel like eventually the backed up data would be tainted and eventually phased out before you notice)... Which idk, it's pretty bad considering there aren't any warnings anywhere that the filesystem is in alpha state and not considered ready for almost any usage outside of testing.

If checks for the Microsoft Windows NTFS implementation, that might be slightly different from the linux/paragon one and might not fix the linux implementation.

This could be true, but I'd expect it to restore a valid partition state still nonetheless. It might do so by discarding more of the broken stuff rather than properly fixing up what could be broken, but at the minimum I'd still honestly expect at least the MFT to be left in a valid state. And then I'm not sure how much can still be attributed to the unsafe shutdown, when it'd then proceed to corrupt the filesystem again and again every single time...

I will now unsubscribe from this gist, because i can not watch any longer how you throw your lifetime away for nothing. it is heartbreaking.
I subscribed it, because we made jokes about it and ranted a bit about this frankenstein thing. And then i just forgot to unsubscribe it. What it has become now is a life lesson for me.

Don't let your evil experiments lying around for random and curious people around, they might get lost in it and take it serious.