Windows Updates Screwed Up My Laptop. So Bye, Bye Windows!

Windows is not activated, my goodness!

Windows 10 Professional was pre-installed on my Dell Inspiron 5480 when I bought it. I kept it there and kept it updated just in case I need to use any Windows application one day.

Until yesterday when as usual Windows suggested another updates. I can't remember all of them but they were Windows 10 version 1909, Intel related stuff and others. As usual I just let them all run. However this time it went really really wrong.

First after a few times restarts I noticed a defaced desktop: the usual wallpaper was set to the default one and the theme was also different because the icons looked different. And second, to my horror, I saw in the Settings that Windows is now not activated!!! What the hell had happened!

I shut down the system just to make sure this was only temporary. The laptop rebooted, but I noticed the grub menu for dual boot had disappeared. It booted directly into Windows. And the defaced desktop and the deactivated Windows are still there. I got really upset. And until now I can't figure out how this could have happened.

Was the Intel update made Windows think there had been change in the hardware? But why did Windows change the EFI entries too? And why and how did Windows change the partitions (see below)?

I took the Ubuntu Live USB and booted into Ubuntu to investigate why grub menu had disappeared. I fired up the gparted and noticed strange change in the partition table. I couldn't believe my eyes! It seemed that Windows Updates had inserted a new partition, i.e. p5 flagged as hidden,diag (see the screenshot below). Because of the new inserted partition my Ubuntu desktop, that was on partition 5, was now on partition 6 and the second linux distro on p7. Not only that the p7 had been flagged as boot,esp.

Windows updates inserted a new partition (p5)!

I really can't explain how Windows updates made this partition change. But I got extremely annoyed of having to reinstall everything. So I decided to say bye, bye to Windows 10 Pro and installed only Ubuntu on this laptop. It took me the whole evening and this morning to setup everything including my virtualbox machines, my Android development tools, etc.

Bye, bye Microsoft Windows. I will not miss you at all!