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Hi,
I want to dualboot Arch and Windows, but don't want to wipe my existing installation of Arch to install Windows.
Do I just have to recreate the Grub config after installing Windows, or is there anything special to worry about?
I'm using an UEFI system with grub, no secure boot and btrfs as the filesystem.
Thanks,
-Malternative_
Last edited by Malternative_ (2021-02-11 08:17:19)
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If it's a UEFI system then you should be able to just bump the NVRAM boot entry for Arch to the top of the bootorder list after Windows is installed.
You can even do this from Windows: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Un … boot_order
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So for grub as an example I just have to execute this?
bcdedit /set "{bootmgr}" path "\EFI\EFI\GRUB\grubx64.efi"
One last question left: do I have to write \EFI\EFI\GRUB\grubx64.efi as the path or \EFI\GRUB\grubx64.efi?
It's probably kind of a dumb question but writing \EFI\EFI just seems wrong, so does windows recognize the path \EFI as /boot or as /boot/EFI?
my non-windows path tho the .efi file is /boot/EFI/GRUB/grubx64.efi
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I'd say use efibootmgr or capabilities of your mainboard first before resorting to change the Windows bootloader.
However I'm assuming that path is from the perspective of the boot loader so the ESP will be the root and thus \EFI\GRUB\grubx64.efi the correct line.
Last edited by V1del (2021-02-10 07:35:32)
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The path will depend on the --bootloader-id used for the grub-install command. If no such option is passed then the path will be as stated above. Perhaps it should be "\EFI\grub\grubx64.efi" but as FAT filesystems don't really distinguish between upper & lower case it might not matter.
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Ok, I've tried it in a virtual machine and regenerating the grub config seemed to work just fine, so I'm probably gonna do that because it's just the easiest way.
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That's not a good test as how painless this will work depends on your mainboard. It "should" work the same way, there are many motherboards that make this painful because they are implemented badly.
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I've tried it and, at least in my case, it wasn't painful.
So on a hp 255 g7 laptop it works great :)
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