Re: Windows only though
"Well it'll understand it's not NTFS and not do anything or it'll corrupt the drive. Same for BitLocker partitions too I would have thought."
Are you sure? Anyway I get enough weird shit happening on my Gentoo powered lappy without holes being punched in /usr/bin by the BIOS.
Funnily enough Lenovo laptops used to the darling of the Linux dev brigade due to the way they had a habit of just working. No more and I'm sure Lenovo's S&M dept are crying into their <whatever_they_drink_there>