Arch Linux

flameradar

Member

Registered: 2025-10-31

Posts: 2

Upgrading Windows 10 to Windows 11 in dualboot system

Hi,

Its my first post in the Arch forums so no bully pls.

I have two operating systems in my computer, Windows 10 and Arch. The kernels are located in different SSDs. I am using rEFInd as my boot loader for selecting which kernel I want to boot into. I also have secure boot enabled, I got it working with sbctl.

If I upgrade Windows 10 to Windows 11 which is located in its separate SSD than where my Arch related media is, will my Arch install be safe from Microsoft?

Will secure boot still work after the Windows version upgrade, or do I have to create and set the keys, and sign all my Arch related root and EFI partitions to get it working again?

Thanks for your time.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,923

Re: Upgrading Windows 10 to Windows 11 in dualboot system

Generally speaking microsoft does and has done very little that would have an implicit effect here, there might be a bad UEFI implementation that wipes it's keys when microsoft adds a new one for the new bootloader but that would be UEFI and mainboard vendor specific and is hard to predict ahead of time.

flameradar

Member

Registered: 2025-10-31

Posts: 2

Re: Upgrading Windows 10 to Windows 11 in dualboot system

But I guess the worse that can then happen is me having to disable secure boot until I generate and setup the keys again.

I guess I can somewhat confidently assume that Microsoft won't brick my Arch in this case.

Thanks for the reply!

cryptearth

Member

Registered: 2024-02-03

Posts: 1,828

Re: Upgrading Windows 10 to Windows 11 in dualboot system

as an advice: if you have two drives - disconnect the arch drive just for the sake of being able to - yes, windows "should" (tm) not touch your arch drive - but there're reports that windows just wipes everything it doesn't know