So I had a dual boot system for most of the year, Windows 10 pro 64bit, and Linux mint cinnamon 19.2. Windows 10 would occasionally bsod with the watchdog error if left to sit for a while, half an hour or more, but Linux was stable, so I figured it was some odd windows driver problem instead of a hardware fault. A few days ago windows 10 crashed oddly, and when I tried to boot it up 2/3 times it is a windows logo screen, but instead of the log in proceeding I get a blank screen that won't change in half an hour. The other third I get the critical process died bsod, and the weird nonbooting means I can't reboot in safemode, although the built in tests seem to indicate that there are no problems with the install. Linux was running fine so I was doing everything through that. The Linux partition actually has a virtualbox clone of the initial install of the windows 10, although I'm not sure If there was an actual back up, I was running out of space on both drives and didn't intend for windows to be the primary. A few days after Win10 dies Linux suddenly fails to boot displaying a blinking black screen, but pressing the power button does make it show the Linux thinking box and shut down. I tried one of the Linux repair modes unsuccessfully, and when shutting down with power button it showed the scripts along with the loading box, and seemed to be shutting down properly at least.


It seems odd that both installs would randomly fail within days of each other, and there are two hdds in the system. Are there any ideas what would cause this?

What type of hard drive are the partitions on, on old is the hard drive, and how used is the hard drive?
I had something like this happen to me in the past and it was the hard drive that was the issue, turned out the drive was having issues with some sectors but when I tried to re format and re partition the drive it just wouldn't accept a new partition, the drive was dead.

Sounds like a power supply problem. HDD's not getting enough power, power supply going into sleep mode due to BIOS/UEFI settings, or the power itself is unstable and dying.

Have you tried moving the two HDD's to different power cables, or gone into your systems BIOS/UEFI to see if anything changed recently?

This is probably HDD/SSD corrupted files issue, or bad RAMs

Try ask friend if you can borrow ram, or make bootable usb to try that system is ok

Disconnect one of the drives, boot up and run it for a few hours, using it as normal, and see how things go.
Shut the machine down, then disconnect that drive and attach the other drive. Boot it up, run it, and use it as you did with the other drive for a few hours and see how that goes.

If you still get errors and signs of corruption on one of the drives, there is a high possibility that that drive could be on the way out. If you still get errors on both of the drives booted separately then there is a high chance that you may have a dodgy or failing power supply.

Windows 10 will auto-update by default and is a bully when it comes to system files
it will ignore you telling it not to update,
it will ignore you telling it not to touch that drive
it will change the default system settings to run Microsoft scans and updates in the background when ever you leave it on without touching it for X time

Linux [for the most part] is much more stable in a dual boot senario

to asnwer your main question = yes they play nice together if you take control of Windows updates away from Microsoft but if you don't know how to do that then the best option is to remove the dual-boot and run a V-Linux inside Hyper-V, VMWare or a portable drive

With the exception of the hdds, all the parts are only a few months old, and the bios menu is a pain to get to, half a second to hit the right key it seems. I'll try to get to the bios again. I really don't like the bios on this pc, that is why I am using a boot loader instead of ust picking a hard drive, because the menu literally disappears as fast as I blink, oh the troubles of too much ram. Also the bios doesn't scale to fit my tv like the os does, this makes it hard to use. I don't know anyone to barrow parts from, they all have macs. I am running memtest86+5.01 which was one of the options that the Linux boot loader offered, but it is taking a while, over 100gigs of ram.
I did boot it up with a linux usb, and it has been running the ram test off the hdd for at least an hour, so I don't think it is any problem with the cpu or power.

the hdds don't make any of the noises I'm accustomed to hearing from failing hdds. I've always had warnings before when hdds were about to have a total failure, but I heard none of the typical sounds. I think both operating systems were on the same drive, as the second drive was installed later.

Ram and HDDs are not related. Ram are those long sticks you put in the slots to increase the memory. Testing the ram only tests the ram. To test the HDD, you'd need another program/utility.

I know. HDDs make the clicking skipping sounds as the arm fails to read the metal disk, or weird beeps for a few days before they fail altogether so you know when to replace them. Ram just chars itself randomly after 10+ years often damaging the slot, and sometimes screwing the file system over to create the strangest of system errors. Spontaneously combusting ram is the worst, as there seems to be no way to track down and fix the glitches it leaves in the os, and half the time the slot gets burnt to where the bios won't detect new ram cards in that position. Usually seems to happen to computers that had daily heavy use, ie rendering image 3 hours remaining.


I found out Linux doesn't run if the HDD is full. Linux is running again, I guess it was just odd timing. Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

^^
Cool. Glad things are working again for you on the Linux HDD.
Brand new power supplies can be janky, experienced that to my great annoyance a few times. Learned to never buy CORSAIR brand power supplies.

Glad you did manage to find the Linux problem but my first guess would also be a power supply issue if both OS's are on separate drives.

I have a very old power supply wich works "ok" and sometimes was used to bench testing. I fried a sdd, a usb3.0 pen drive and 3 Windows installs until the problem was found. PSU's can act very funny, specially on noisy environments and they tend to "degrade" over time.
In my experience, usually the first indication the power supply is failing is corrupted files, because most components have voltage regulators wich somewhat filter some voltage spikes, most storage devices don't.

Sure, let's just throw 800$ to TooMany$ at a glorified Unix machine.

I agree, macs have always been far more money for the same equipment. Would never get a Mac desktop. Though the iPhone and iPad are reasonably good.

both os are on the same drive, If I unplugged one drive it gave a sys recovery error, the other gave a no bootable media error.

Interestingly I learned that holding "A" on powering on doesn't skip everything to boot strait from the floppy drive anymore, or maybe because it was a usb floppy drive. At first I thought I finally found a system dos couldn't boot for repairs, then I tried the bios and found the shortcut just isn't valid anymore.

They also void your warranty if you upgrade the ram yourself.
I used to own a g4 tower that I was given. It was beautiful on the inside probably easy to repair, if we were allowed too. I have used modern imacs, both at the college and tutoring others. I've used half a dozen ios versions, and all of them pissed me off. Apple/mac has too much proprietary drivers(icade) and hardware, and the limited hardware software compatibility leading to much fewer upgrade options. Worst of all, I hated the operating systems. Additionally, I didn't find them any better for photo processing and editing than windows so how they became the standard I don't know.
I don't like how every windows OS after 98SE takes more and more control away from me, but every mac seemed horribly locked down forcing basic functions like transferring files between devices to have to be filtered through apple software instead of simple cut/paste like any other system including dos.

If Macs work for you, have fun, but they don't work for me, and they weren't in my budget.

Give us an example? For example: moving some on-screen setting to the registry makes it less obvious to change it... it is however not "taking control away".