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My appologies in advance if similar questions has been asked. I actually wanted to ask this in comments on one post but don't have enough reputation.

I have a 256GB SSD containing Windows10 and Arch as well as ESP or EFI partition created by Win10. While installing Arch I made sure that only /boot/efi gets loaded into EFI partition and not /boot so it don't get any OS specific data. Its size is just 99MB and around 60MB is still free so I guess it worked. GRUB2 is my bootloader.

Now I want to enable/use hibernation in Win10 and/or Linux. According to How should I set up my dual-boot so that I can hibernate the secondary OS? the most impotent thing is to not mount any shared drives on startup. My question is, does having same ESP drive counts? Or this requirements is only for data drives? Next less important question, can I manually mount drive, say Win10 NTFS into Linux, after startup as per need without data loss?

My main purpose, atleast for now, is not switch OS in hibernation but simply able to hibernate. I am fine with session (not saved data) lose if I switch OS after putting one in hibernation.

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The link you quoted says :

you must not touch any volumes that were mounted on that machine (i.e. any FAT32 or NTFS partitions assigned a drive letter in the hibernated OS).

I take this to mean that as long as Linux does not mount the hibernated Windows partition, then Windows will be fine.

The article does warn that mounting the hibernated Windows partition may cause catastrophic failure to Windows.

I would like to remark that defining one OS as a virtual machine inside the other will solve all these problems, as long as your RAM is sufficient.

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  • Unfortunately that linked page doesn't cite any references, and I'd be curious myself to find out from Microsoft's own docs whether Windows treats the EFI partition specially or not...
    – grawity_u1686
    Commented Oct 7, 2018 at 22:31
  • The EFI partition does not handle hibernation - that is handled by the OS. The information for the hibernation is stored by the OS within its partition and is used when booting. All that the UEFI/BIOS do is launch the OS boot and furnish some services, mostly device oriented.
    – harrymc
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 6:18
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    Well, whether it handles hibernation or not is not relevant because the OS still keeps all partitions mounted – parts of the filesystem metadata are kept in memory (and therefore in the hibernation image). For example, if you hibernate a Windows system with two NTFS partitions and boot Linux meanwhile, it is completely unsafe to change D: from Linux, even though the hiberfile went strictly to C: – Windows just won't notice any changes after you resume. So the interesting part of the question is: is it equally unsafe to touch the EFI partition too, or does Windows special-case and unmount it?
    – grawity_u1686
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 6:22
  • @grawity: I think you misunderstood my comment.
    – harrymc
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 6:56
  • harrymc thank you for your answer. What I understand is as long as I return back to hibernated Windows and don't load Linux, I should be fine? Also, from your reply to @grawity, since EFI is not part of hibernation process, it should be OK to hibernate anyway. Is that what you are saying? I just like to point out that my question is not specific to windows. I want to hibernate Linux as well.
    – Ali Faizan
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 21:14

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