I’m looking to install Linux on our home laptop and see if I can convince my wife to migrate off Windows. Since I’m not sure there won’t be times we need or want to boot back into Windows, I want to set it up so we can dual boot. The laptop only has a spot for one drive however so I can’t use two drives and chose them with the bios. I know in the past Windows has been problematic with dual boot setups on a single drive, corrupting the boot drive following updates and what-not. I’d really like to avoid that if possible.
Any suggestions on how best to go about it, or something I should at least avoid because it’s known to be problematic?


The annoying thing is that this is not possible without sacrificing system stability, there are about half a dozen known issues with windows update removing Linux bootloaders in a dual boot system, and it has personally bricked my system twice even with booting from a separate drive. I would highly recommend making your fallback a VM like qemu or a more well integrated one like winboat, it is just not worth the risk to dual boot.
That’s definitely my fear. Tychosmoose’s experience gives me hope but maybe that’s just setting me up for disappointment. I guess I at least wanna make sure I keep my system backed up before updating Windows and maybe disabling auto updates.
I do not believe you can disable auto update anymore on windows.