Arch Linux

BishopBlade

Member

Registered: 2013-07-11

Posts: 16

[SOLVED] Windows on one drive, Arch on another - how to set this up?

Hi all,

I recently built a new desktop and plan to install Arch alongside Windows. I currently have one SSD that Windows is installed on, and another for Arch to be installed on. The system is UEFI.

I'm not sure how to set it up so that I can access both drives. If I create a new ESP on the Arch drive and install GRUB to that, can I just select which drive to boot from in the BIOS and everything will work? Please let me know if setting it up that way wouldn't work and/or there is a better method to dual boot. Thank you.

Last edited by BishopBlade (2018-05-22 23:53:37)

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 13,729

Re: [SOLVED] Windows on one drive, Arch on another - how to set this up?

Assuming you have sane firmware, it will read from the NVRAM entries and boot whatever you tell it to use. You can use separate ESPs or not, your choice.

Aklo09

Member

Registered: 2017-05-17

Posts: 9

Re: [SOLVED] Windows on one drive, Arch on another - how to set this up?

I had a Windows 10 installation and I've added Arch on a new disk with a new ESP.
Then copied Windows boot loader to new ESP (the old one is still there just in case...)

I would suggest using rEFInd as a boot manager, much much simpler than Grub and it has an excellent upstream documentation .

Morn

Member

Registered: 2012-09-02

Posts: 886

Re: [SOLVED] Windows on one drive, Arch on another - how to set this up?

I have simply added rEFInd to the ESP on the main (Windows) SSD. Arch lives on the HDD (ext4). Works just fine, rEFInd lets me choose between Windows and Linux.

The only problem I had in the beginning was that rEFInd got confused when multiple Linux kernels (e.g. linux and linux-lts) were installed, using the wrong RAM disk with each kernel. I am sure that could have been fixed somehow, but in the end I just opted to remove the extra kernel.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,543

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Windows on one drive, Arch on another - how to set this up?

RTFW.  Then ask specific questions if you have any.

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

BishopBlade

Member

Registered: 2013-07-11

Posts: 16

Re: [SOLVED] Windows on one drive, Arch on another - how to set this up?

Thanks all. I will be using rEFInd.