Experience installing Windows 10

I needed Windows to run some programs. I've set up dual boot Windows - Ubuntu on both my (Win 8.1, Ubuntu 16) and (Win 10, Ubuntu 14 and 18) laptops before, but I decided I didn't want to clutter the NVMe drive. I purchased a separate SSD, installed it, downloaded the Win 10 installation media to a USB, and installed it using "custom installation". I made sure to select the SSD drive. Windows seemed to install fine. I then rebooted. The windows boot manager appeared on the NVMe. Oh shit. I booted into CentOS, which luckily still worked fine. I did some searching in directories and googling and discovered something...incredibly...stupid. Windows 10 does not necessarily install its bootloader on the drive you select! It just installs it on the first drive in the boot order. What the f&*#! Why, just why... There's an easy fix luckily. In windows, open an admin powershell and run "bcdboot C:\Windows /s C:". This adds the boot files to the C: drive. Then shutdown, and your BIOS should detect the bootloader on the correct disk. To get rid of the bootloader on my linux drive (the NVMe), I just deleted the Microsoft folder in the /boot/efi/EFI directory. Oddly, the BIOS still thinks it exists, but trying to boot with it doesn't do anything. Booting with the windows boot manager on the correct drive now works, though.

Lesson learned: Unplug all drives if installing windows on a new/separate drive.

Another problem I ran into is that Windows wouldn't shut down. Clicking the power button and selecting shutdown just logged me out and blanked the screen. I had to disable Fastboot under power button settings->advanced settings to get the computer to shutdown. 

To activate it, I purchased a Windows 10 Pro product key from eBay. They're only a few dollars, so I thought it would be worth a try. The first seller I purchased from strung me a long with not-working keys for a couple days before I filed for a refund (eBay money back guarantee). The second seller had a better feedback score (99.8). I received the key within 1 minute via email and it worked. I don't think it's transferable, but for 5 dollars, I could buy many many of these keys for the price of an actual Windows 10 Pro disc. I think the key is to buy from a seller that has a high feedback rating and seems to be selling a lot of them. 

Another issue I ran into recently with Win 10 on another laptop: you can't create recovery media using the recovery menu option. Supposedly it works right after installing windows 10, but after a bunch of updates, it always fails. There's a huge thread about this on the micrsoft forum. The only way around this is to create new installation media, which contains recovery options.

It's shit like this that reminds me why I prefer Linux now. Windows is supposed to "just work", but it can be just as much of a pain in the ass to deal with as Linux, but without the ability to fix it.