Arch Linux

MidnightEagle11

Member

Registered: 2014-04-03

Posts: 1

Dual booting Windows AFTER Arch installation

I've been using arch for about 8 months now and absolutely love it but never was able to get League of Legends to work right, and a few other things don't want to work. Most of it isn't a big deal, but I was hoping to make a small Windows partition for when I want to do those specific things. The wiki assumes (and suggests) that Windows should be installed first, but I would really hate to have to reinstall ALL of my Linux stuff and have to backup all of these files. Is there any safe way to install Windows AFTER installing Arch?

If not, this will sound dumb, but could I just copy all of the directories to an external harddrive as root and then wipe the drive, install Windows, reinstall Linux the way the wiki says to, and then just move all of the files back into it, or would that not work? I just really want to dual boot and don't want to lose any data or spend the next several weeks tweaking Arch to be just the way I like it again.

Thanks!

clfarron4

Member

From: London, UK

Registered: 2013-06-28

Posts: 2,163

Website

Re: Dual booting Windows AFTER Arch installation

The main issue that arises from installing Windows after Linux is that Windows over-writes the bootloader.

If in doubt when installing ANY operating system, do all your partitioning first and backup your data.

I have a question: What media are you using to install Windows (recovery partition, vendor provided disks, digital river ISO or pure un-tainted Windows DVDs?), and which version of it are you installing?

Last edited by clfarron4 (2014-06-28 20:51:03)

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henk

Member

From: Weert, Netherlands

Registered: 2013-01-01

Posts: 334

Re: Dual booting Windows AFTER Arch installation

The easy way to do this would be to install windows on a second HD. Change boot order of the disks, install windows, change the boot order back, do a new grub-mkconfig
and you are done. This way you would work around the " Windows on first partition rule". This rule is not set in concrete however, but has caused problems.

Buddlespit

Member

From: Chesapeake, Va.

Registered: 2014-02-07

Posts: 501

Re: Dual booting Windows AFTER Arch installation

I found that the easiest way would be to add a disk and make it the first drive (ie- SATA-0 plug) and install windows to that disk. I have a UEFI system, so all I had to do is tell it to load my Arch boot drive first. I then used rEFInd to scan all my EFI's, then configured rEFInd to boot my "second" option (Arch) as default with a ten second timer.

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