Hello Ray,
My suggestion would be to have a dedicated ESP partition for each
operating system you want to cram into your computer, and that each of
your OSes takes advantage of EFI auto discovery.
Because if your other OSes rely on explicit boot entries from EFI NVRAM,
then those entries will not survive when Windows performs an aggressive
update. These kinds of updates don't happen everyday but are guaranteed
to happen some day, so that's why most people are caught off-guard when
they happen.
Your best recourse as I said, is having a separate dedicated ESP
partition for every operating system. But on top of that, you want to
make sure that your other operating systems' bootloaders are installed
in \EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI (assuming you're on amd64) of their respective
ESP partitions. The reason why this path is because this is a magic
fallback path in EFI - these boot entries get auto discovered. So that
covers you in case Windows nukes your explicit boot entries - you'll
just make do with implicit, auto discovered boot entries. But what this
approach can't protect you from, is when Windows breaks the boot order.
I hope this helps and explains how you can manage this problem.
Best regards,
Michał
W dniu 19.12.2025 o 23:42, Ray Davison via Freedos-user pisze:
For me, FreeDOS is not some antique to play with. My first PC was an
AT clone running DOS 3.3. One day later the AT got Norton Commander
and after another two days it got WordPerfect. I was in an
engineering office, both programs were "borrowed", and I later bought
both. And I have been doing serious file management and work in DOS
ever since.
The market forced me to add Windows. My PCs for well over a decade
have had DOS and a boot manager on a 2G at volume one as the only
primary. Two versions each of OS/2 and Windows, and Apps, Data,
"Stuff",,, are all on logicals. When Windows was installed on a
logical, there was already an active, primary partition at volume one,
so it did not create a System partition but used the existing active
partition.
My boot manager is a DOS program. It has picked up every OS/2 and Win
version since at least W2K including W7. W7 is the last version I
have added to that scheme. I have not attempted to see if it would
boot Linux. And I know nothing about Grub.
In the early days of Linux I attended an event and left with a stuffed
penguin and a credit card with a picture of a penguin on it. I still
have both. But at that time I decided I did not have a problem for
which Linux was the solution. But Win has made me the frog in a pot
of water on the stove. Win has become so unbearable that I am going
to jump out. I have had a LAN since DOS was the only thing. This
year I have watched my LAN die as each client PC was "updated".
I assume everyone on this list is also using something besides
FreeDOS. My preference is to continue the scheme I have had - DOS up
front, DOS boot manager, one or more Linux versions, probably a W7
partition.
For a long time we assumed that the BIOS was the personal property of
the PC owner - no piece of software could mess with it. I was
recently informed that Win8 gained access to the BIOS.
Well, it seems it is more than just access, it owns it. When I added
a second W11 partition Win created a boot manager that apparently
resides in the BIOS. And Win will fight to retain control of the PC.
With grub2win I was able to add a Linux partition to the boot
manager. It did not boot, and a bold "Auto repair" message appeared
on the screen, and the download grub2win Zip and the extracted file
disappeared.
Suggestions?
TY
Ray
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