Hello, I accidentally discovered that if you boot into Windows with a Fedora bootable flash drive, the data on the flash drive will be corrupted.
With such a “corrupted” flash drive, you can boot into LiveUSB, but when checking for integrity, it gives an error and Fedora does not recommend installing the operating system from this flash drive.
At first, I thought that I had a low-quality flash drive, so I wrote to another one, passed the test, but after booting into Windows, the integrity test failed again.
I did not access the flash drive in Windows, did not copy files from there. The flash drive was simply inserted into the USB port.
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Did you click on any dialogs that windows pops up?
For example telling you that the usb stick is not usable by windows?
If you did then you may have told windows to format the usb stick.
Nothing!
It’s quite simple: just boot into Windows without doing anything, just shut down the computer, and the Fedora bootable flash drive will be corrupted. This happened on both Windows 10 and Windows 11. Windows does not format the flash drive, but it changes something on it. You can boot into live Fedora from the flash drive, but the live USB test fails.
It is probably because windows automounts the file systems, or whatever windows does when it detect a new USB device. Do you see a drive letter being assigned to the USB device, or something similar?
Another possibility.
Windows seems to flag all attached devices as open/dirty when shutdown with fast boot enabled. This flag may be the corruption you note.
When using linux (either installed or otherwise) windows should NEVER be set to fast boot since fedora cannot be booted properly until that flag is removed from the device by windows
I don’t know for sure but simply booting windows with the device attached then turning off fast boot before shutting down windows may clear the flag and allow the integrity check to pass successfully with the next boot to that device. Dismounting the device before shutdown also should work.
I’ve had this problem for years and years. Quite an annoyance.
I never learned that the corrupted image could still be booted: I always check integrity and abandon the drive when the check fails. Nice to know: I might get sloppy.
Once upon a time, I used cmp(1) to see what was mutated by Windows. I don’t remember the details, but it was quite minor.
For more information, the Rufus faq has this https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/wiki/FAQ#user-content-Im_using_an_ISO_with_a_checksum_validation_test_and_the_test_fails_despite_using_DD_mode_in_Rufus
Also see https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/2051
The Rufus faq has quite a bit if interesting reading for those who are interested.
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