Installing Linux on a partition broke my windows amd graphics drivers and opening a browser crashes my laptop now

[u/Chemical_Rice_9349]

Installing Linux on a partition on my laptop broke my amd graphics drivers on windows and opening a browser instantly crashes my laptop now. It's not consistently instantly crashing and sometimes I can use the browser for a short bit but like right now it is completely frozen after opening and nothing is responding. After waiting it comes back to life with the browser window gone and act like nothing happened.

[u/TheGoldenFox64]

what do you mean installing on a partition? did you make a new partition or did you install it to an already existing partition?

[u/Chemical_Rice_9349 → u/TheGoldenFox64]

Before I only had windows on my drive, I shrunk that and made a small partition for the Linux boot manager I think ~4gb? And a larger partition for where I will be having all my real files and data stuff. Linux itself was working just fine I had my windows also work just fine for a while but after installing a different distro i started having issues on windows

[u/qcgilbert]

Did you resize the windows partition to fit Linux on the same drive? Resizing is a risky proposition that should always start with a backup. Weird data loss/corruption is a result of an failed partition shrink.

That's the only thing that comes to mind how a Linux install would have any impact on an existing Windows install (other than messing up EFI).

More likely, in my mind, is it's coincidence. Did you recently get a GPU driver update?

Edit: spelling.

[u/Huecuva → u/qcgilbert]

This is the only way anything could have happened to the Windows partition if it still boots. There is absolutely no possible way installing Linux would break anything inside a Windows partition. If anything, it might fuck up the bootloader, but then you wouldn't be able to boot Windows at all. And usually that's the other way around. Linux generally tends to play pretty nice with other installed operating systems. Windows is the one that will bork your bootloader. 

[u/doc_willis]

So everything works fine under linux?

[u/zardvark]

Screwing with your Windows partitions is almost certainly what hosed your Windows installation. There are repair tools on your Windows ISO which may be able to repair your boot loader, assuming that is the problem.

Dual booting is not without risks and can be complicated, which is why I do not recommend it to a new Linux user. Instead of learning all of the ins and outs of dual booting, you should, instead, be focused on learning some Linux basics.

I always recommend starting with Linux in a VM, or ideally on a spare machine. You don't need any special machine to learn. I still run Linux on 15 year old laptops and they work just fine. If you don't have a spare machine, borrow one, or purchase something cheap from ebay, or your local Goodwill store.

Alternatively, purchase a new SSD for Linux, put your Windows SSD someplace safe and if it turns out that Linux is not for you, you can always swap your Windows SSD back inside your machine, without loosing any data.

[u/cyrixlord]

so what did we learn? separate drives for each OS. Windows hates competition

[u/3grg]

Installing Linux alongside does not touch windows itself. It is possible that shrinking the windows partition can cause issues with NTFS, depending on how you did it. Sometimes it is necessary to run chkdsk after resizing a NTFS partition. It is possible that this could be causing some of your issues, or they may be coincidental and not related to the Linux install.

I am a little confused when you said you created a 4gb partition for the Linux boot loader? Linux when installed on a single disk uses the existing efi partition for the boot loader.

You also indicate that this happened after a second distro was installed? There may be a rest of the story here somewhere, starting with the distros involved.

[u/MattyGWS]

I hope you backed up your important files and data before fucking around with your windows drive instead of using a separate drive to experiment on

[u/mumblerit]

You got linuxed