Arch Linux

elintendo

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Registered: 2023-12-21

Posts: 19

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Dual Boot Arch and Windows on separate disks

I have two disks, sda is empty, nvme0n1 has Arch installed (with grub on nvme0n1p1).

$ lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda           8:0    0 119.2G  0 disk 
nvme0n1     259:0    0 119.2G  0 disk 
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0     1G  0 part 
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0   100G  0 part /
└─nvme0n1p3 259:3    0    16G  0 part [SWAP]

I want to install Windows 10 on sda disk.
My question is, should I just do usual Windows setup, and there will be no problems with Windows bootloader on sda and grub on nvme0n1?

d.ALT

Member

Registered: 2019-05-10

Posts: 920

Re: Dual Boot Arch and Windows on separate disks

IIRC Windows will <<Seek And Destroy>> any suitable $ESP (FAT32) it will find during its (installation) path.
Not a big deal, though: just re-install GRUB.

Or, you could go by a manual Windows' (10 and/or 11) installation: https://gist.github.com/aubymori/a8b91e … 6fa774cf50
(with that you'll be able forcing Window's $ESP installation wherevere you want)

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<50,17,III,I>    misericordia e giustizia li sdegna:
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d_fajardo

Member

Registered: 2017-07-28

Posts: 1,571

Re: Dual Boot Arch and Windows on separate disks

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dual_boot_with_Windows

cryptearth

Banned

Registered: 2024-02-03

Posts: 74

Re: Dual Boot Arch and Windows on separate disks

You CAN recover from whatever mess windows will end up causing - but I highly recommend going "the arch way" by doing the windows install manual - as you're using arch anyway already.

elintendo

Member

Registered: 2023-12-21

Posts: 19

Website

Re: Dual Boot Arch and Windows on separate disks

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dual_boot_with_Windows

I do not see any recommendations on installing Arch and Windows on separate disks in this article.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,831

Re: Dual Boot Arch and Windows on separate disks

There's nothing inherently magic about that usecase, it will generally work, if you don't want Windows to add itself to the ESP of the Arch disk you might want to preempt that and explictly create a new ESP on /dev/sda.

Unless you mess up during drive/partition selection the worst that can happen is that your bootloader/the bootorder gets overridden, which is all trivially fixable.

elintendo

Member

Registered: 2023-12-21

Posts: 19

Website

Re: Dual Boot Arch and Windows on separate disks

There's nothing inherently magic about that usecase, it will generally work, if you don't want Windows to add itself to the ESP of the Arch disk you might want to preempt that and explictly create a new ESP on /dev/sda.

Unless you mess up during drive/partition selection the worst that can happen is that your bootloader/the bootorder gets overridden, which is all trivially fixable.

Do you mean that I should do 

mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1 

on Arch and then proceed with Windows installation?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,831

Re: Dual Boot Arch and Windows on separate disks

And properly give the partition a ESP GUID; https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/EFI_system_partition

PeterP_swe

Member

Registered: 2023-09-26

Posts: 11

Re: Dual Boot Arch and Windows on separate disks

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dual_boot_with_Windows

I do not see any recommendations on installing Arch and Windows on separate disks in this article.

What I did was:

1) Plug in only the first harddrive, then install Windows as normal.
2) Remove the first harddrive and plug in the second, then install Arch Linux as normal.
3) Plug in the first harddrive again and set up BIOS to always boot with the drive that has preferred OS installed.
4) Whenever I want to boot into the other OS I hit F8 (ASUS motherboards) or F11 (MSI motherboards) after pressing the power button and pick the drive the other OS is installed on. This is just a temporary override, the next boot it will pick the default drive again.

That way there's no risk that Windows and Linux will mess with each other. And it works the same no matter how many OS/drives you want to use. It also makes it easy to add or remove OS/drives without having to change anything in boot loaders.

Last edited by PeterP_swe (2024-03-16 22:47:38)

Roken

Member

From: South Wales, UK

Registered: 2012-01-16

Posts: 1,253

Re: Dual Boot Arch and Windows on separate disks

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dual_boot_with_Windows

I do not see any recommendations on installing Arch and Windows on separate disks in this article.

What I did was:

1) Plug in only the first harddrive, then install Windows as normal.
2) Remove the first harddrive and plug in the second, then install Arch Linux as normal.
3) Plug in the first harddrive again and set up BIOS to always boot with the drive that has preferred OS isntalled.
4) Whenever I want to boot into the other OS I hit F8 (ASUS motherboards) or F11 (MSI motherboards) after pressing the power button and pick the drive the other OS is installed on.

That way there's no risk that Windows and Linux will mess with each other.

I did 1 and 2, but setup my system to boot grub, and added Windows to Grub. Avoids messing with BIOS boot order.

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Ryzen 5900X 12 core/24 thread - RTX 3090 FE 24 Gb, Asus Prime B450 Plus, 32Gb Corsair DDR4, Cooler Master N300 chassis, 5 HD (1 NvME PCI, 4SSD) + 1 x optical.
Linux user #545703

lo7777799

Member

Registered: 2023-07-25

Posts: 35

Re: Dual Boot Arch and Windows on separate disks

i know, that you need the arch-linux-repository-package os-prober. install it with

pacman -S os-prober 

os-prober

after installation of os-prober you can  run the programm ...

os-prober

and after that and if you want to have grub as bootloader, you must do the grub installation with pacman -S grub and grub-install and grub-mkconfig again. i have done that with an  earlier installation on my pc and it worked.

CommanderCortex

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From: Auckland

Registered: 2023-12-30

Posts: 2

Website

Re: Dual Boot Arch and Windows on separate disks

Always install windows first, then Arch and ensure you change your boot order in the bios, this will prevent windows from trying to override grub, done ez fix

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chris@arch ~ >

EmanueleVR

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From: Tuscany

Registered: 2024-04-22

Posts: 2

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Re: Dual Boot Arch and Windows on separate disks

I have two disks, sda is empty, nvme0n1 has Arch installed (with grub on nvme0n1p1).

$ lsblkelintendo
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda           8:0    0 119.2G  0 disk 
nvme0n1     259:0    0 119.2G  0 disk 
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0     1G  0 part 
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0   100G  0 part /
└─nvme0n1p3 259:3    0    16G  0 part [SWAP]

I want to install Windows 10 on sda disk.
My question is, should I just do usual Windows setup, and there will be no problems with Windows bootloader on sda and grub on nvme0n1?

Install Windows on sda with no problem, but prepare an ArchLinux fresh usb stick for recover GRUB.

Seeing from your output it seems like you are not mounting the boot or efi partition, take a look at:

/etc/fstab

If you wish to have it mounted at startup, take a look:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fstab# … g_genfstab

To recover grub you need to know if your installation is UEFI or Legacy/CSM!