Arch Linux

Molek

Member

Registered: 2017-06-09

Posts: 2

[Solved]Issues with Archlinux and Windows co-existance and grub.

EDIT:
Solved.
I had hoped not to change to GPT on the Windows Installation disk because of fear of data loss. As it turns out it's possible to do it safely so that's what I did and therefore avoided MBR/GPT compatability issues.

Hello.

This is my second archlinux installation but under different circumstances and I've found myself having problems.

Goal.
My PC uses Windows 10 exclusively on "Disk 0" with the old MBR partition style. I don't want to mess with that so I figured I would use my external hard drive "Disk 1" with GPT partition style that I could use to boot into Archlinux.

Problem.
When I boot into the grub installation from UEFI on "Disk 1", the PC either freezes or just boots into Windows (even though grub shouldn't even recognize windows to begin with (no config for it and windows entirely on another disk)).
Motherboard: Asrock 890FX Deluxe P1.80

What I've done.

To my knowledge I've done all the core installation steps correctly.
A 550 MB EFI partition formatted with mkfs.fat -s1 -F32 mounted on /boot/efi
A 400GB ext4 partition to hold the whole installation on /

Screenshot of partition layouts on the disks.
http://i.imgur.com/CV0vWI1.png

http://i.imgur.com/ISe8Fse.jpg?1
This confuration has been genfstabbed to /etc/fstab

Grub is set up with

mkinitcpio -p linux

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=grub-main1

#Its definitely in there

ls /boot/efi/EFI/grub-main1/
grubx64.efi

I've been hacking at this for a while now, having reformatted the EFI system partition multiple times and reinstalling grub.
For whatever reason, the UEFI setup utility doesn't seem to forget older grub installations even though their partitions have been reformatted so the booting options list is a mess but grub-main1 is the most recent one.
http://i.imgur.com/PXBNMxm.jpg

If anyone knows why booting into grub doesn't work I'd love to hear it!
Thanks in advance.

Last edited by Molek (2017-06-11 10:59:02)

c00ter

Member

From: Alaskan in Washington State

Registered: 2014-08-28

Posts: 421

Re: [Solved]Issues with Archlinux and Windows co-existance and grub.

From my readings, it appears MSDOS/MBR doesn't mix well (in most cases) with GPT/EFI. There are reportedly a few systems whose hardware can handle this, but not many. So generally you can have one or the other, but not both. Since you report running Windows in MSDOS/MBR, the simplest solution would be to continue on with that.

Regards

---

UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn

x33a

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2009-08-15

Posts: 4,587

Re: [Solved]Issues with Archlinux and Windows co-existance and grub.

@Molek, read our forum guidelines about posting images:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Co … s_and_code

Molek

Member

Registered: 2017-06-09

Posts: 2

Re: [Solved]Issues with Archlinux and Windows co-existance and grub.

Sorry about the images, I'll make sure to read the guidelines better before further posts.

I couldn't solve my problem so I just changed "Disk 0" to GPT style with Windows booting through EFI and actually managed to keep my Windows files in-tact. Happy ending

x33a

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2009-08-15

Posts: 4,587

Re: [Solved]Issues with Archlinux and Windows co-existance and grub.

Cool. Please edit your first post and prepend [solved] at the beginning of the thread title.