I have used Linux Mint 18 with Windows 10 in dual boot since over a year now and never had a problem. Out of nowhere I was unable to boot Linux, seemingly due to a Windows update, because I didn't use Linux for a while. I thought okay nice, I can easily reinstall Linux (19 this time) and use my Timeshift backup to restore my data.

Well, that didn't quite work: Linux got installed but somehow my mouse didn't work. I couldn't get the drivers to work properly and broke Linux again, so "shit here we go again" and an installed it again. My mouse works fine this time but after restarting Linux, I was unable to log into Cinnamon. I type in my password, the screen flashes, and then the login screen comes back. This loop continues forever. So I reinstalled the Cinnamon desktop. That didn't work either. So I reinstalled Linux again. Now I can't even boot into it, because it doesn't show up in the UEFI as boot entry.

How do you guys handle this kind of situations? Is there an even "cleaner" way to reinstall Linux?

My drive setup is as follows:

• 500GB SSD for Windows 10 only, with its own EFI partition (I guess it is for the Windows Bootloader only?)
• 250GB SSD for Linux Mint only, with swap, /, /home, and EFI partition  (that is the one used by GRUB I guess?)

One important thing to point out: Before every reinstall of Linux, I deleted, and formated its partitions via Windows, but kept the EFI (GRUB) partition. I just deleted the ubuntu folder from the EFI partition and deleted the old UEFI boot entries. Was that a bad idea?

I have used Linux Mint 18 with Windows 10 in dual boot since over a year now and never had a problem. Out of nowhere I was unable to boot Linux, seemingly due to a Windows update, because I didn't use Linux for a while. I thought okay nice, I can easily reinstall Linux (19 this time) and use my Timeshift backup to restore my data.

Well, that didn't quite work: Linux got installed but somehow my mouse didn't work. I couldn't get the drivers to work properly and broke Linux again, so "shit here we go again" and an installed it again. My mouse works fine this time but after restarting Linux, I was unable to log into Cinnamon. I type in my password, the screen flashes, and then the login screen comes back. This loop continues forever. So I reinstalled the Cinnamon desktop. That didn't work either. So I reinstalled Linux again. Now I can't even boot into it, because it doesn't show up in the UEFI as boot entry.

How do you guys handle this kind of situations? Is there an even "cleaner" way to reinstall Linux?

My drive setup is as follows:

• 1TB HDD for large programs (games etc)
• 4TB HDD for data
• 250GB SSD for Linux Mint only, with swap, /, /home, and EFI partition  (that is the one used by GRUB I guess?)
• 500GB SSD for Windows 10 only, with its own EFI partition (I guess it is for the Windows Bootloader only?)

As you can see my drives are in a weird order. But that shouldn't matter as far as i know.

One important thing to point out: Before every reinstall of Linux, I deleted, and formated its partitions via Windows, but kept the EFI (GRUB) partition. I just deleted the ubuntu folder from the EFI partition and deleted the old UEFI boot entries. Was that a bad idea?