Windows 8 hints for dual-booters

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org
Sat Oct 19 20:53:27 UTC 2013


[Some of this is guesswork.]

When you tell Windows 8 to "shut down", by default it does so in a way
to enable "fast startup".  It is like a partial hibernate: some state
is saved in a "hibernate file".

There are some indications that this causes risks for dual-booters.
<http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Linux-and-Windows-8-Fast-Startup-puts-data-at-risk-1780640.html>
This particular risk is for using shared filesystems.  I don't know if
there are other risks.

It appears to me that after Windows Updates that say that they require
a restart, shutdown and reboot don't count (they used to).  I don't
use restart because the shutdown portion takes so long and I have to
watch to catch the reboot to select Windows (not the default on my
machines).  I think that disabling fast startup fixed this.  I'm not
100% sure and I don't want to perform the experiments to confirm this.

How do you turn off "fast boot"? Control Panel: Power Options: what
the power button does: change settings that are currently unavailable.
Then deselect "turn on fast startup".  It is hard to find.  When I
updated to Win 8.1, the setting went back to the default, unsafe form.

War story:

On one machine, I did a normal update for Win8 (not to Win8 nor to
Win8.1) overnight (it was slow).  I think that I shut down and started
it again (not sure).  I certainly did not do a "restart" from Windows.

Then I wanted to update to 8.1 (you do that for free from the
Microsoft Store).  But the update was not visible.  Why??

So I tried the Facebook app that was on offer.  Well, it said

	"Sorry, this app can't be installed because your PC doesn't
	meet the minimum system requirements"

That's odd.  I don't actually mind since I wasn't actually going to
install it.  But why?  It turns out that, without any documentation,
the Facebook app in the Windows store (for Win8 and Win 8.1) only
works on Win 8.1!
<http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/17/4846000/facebook-windows-8-official-app-launch>

At this point, I disabled fast boot, shutdown, had some updates
applied, and rebooted to Win 8.

Maybe fast boot enabled prevented updates being applied.

Now the Microsoft Store shows the Win 8.1 update!

It sure would have been nice if these various problems / requirements
had been explained to me by the oh-so-helpful GUI.  How hard is that?

The free Win 8.1 upgrade requires a 4G download for each machine every
time you upgrade.  If you have to re-install your OS, you have to
re-install the original (disks if you made restore disks, or from the
restore partition) and then download the upgrade again.
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