Arch Linux

giselher_moe

Member

Registered: 2020-09-12

Posts: 4

Can not get this dual boot to work. Please Help!

Hello everyone,

I have been doing some extensive testing on my computer to see just why this dual boot is not working. So here is what I have so far. This is where I am stuck. Its kind of a long story.

To begin, I installed Arch via chroot. I have previously migrated from an only Gentoo system so I am somewhat proficient at this. This is the new system: I have two NVMe SSD's in my computer. One of them has Windows 10 on it. The other has Arch. It should be stated that these two operating systems have completely separate EFI partitions which is completely fine. After setting up grub, I run efibootmgr to see that Arch is first to be booted. I reboot and for some reason it takes me directly to Windows 10. It seems I was stuck. So for a while I banged my head against the wall and wondered why. A friend (completely new to linux) installed Manjaro within a day on his windows pc. I was blown away by his ease of dual booting and I looked at his partition scheme it was nearly identical in set up(seperate efi for seperate os). So I gave Manjaro a shot. The graphical install was easy but on reboot it again went to Windows 10. I then opened a command prompt within Windows 10 and ran the command "bcdedit /set {bootmgr} path \EFI\manjaro\grubx64.efi" and rebooted. This time straight to Manjaro! With this success I reinstalled Arch and did the exact same thing. IT DID NOT WORK!!!! Why?? My motherboard is an MSI Mortar z370M. I have no ability to set boot priority within this bios because its dumb af and I've already tested that the bios is not the problem. So fellas, how do I fix this?

I did notice his partition scheme had some some extra partition for Manjaro while mine just had an efi, swap and root.

Much thanks in advance!

kermit63

Member

Registered: 2018-07-04

Posts: 174

Re: Can not get this dual boot to work. Please Help!

V1del wrote:

Reuse the ESP Windows created... (there's no guarantee that your UEFI supports multiple ESP partitions (even though it should)) whether your Arch's root partition resides somewhere else is irrelevant, you will just pass the correct root partition to the initramfs anyway. What you will have to decide here is whether you want to use EFISTUB or so to boot the kernel image directly from the ESP, or opt for GRUB or refind to boot the kernel image directly from the linux partition. Depends a bit on what you want to do here, the default ESP size created by windows is usually on the smaller side and only sufficient for one or two kernels.

You ignored the advise of a respected member of the forum on this thread by creating multiple EFI partitions, made a mess of your installation, then expect people to spend time helping you?

Last edited by kermit63 (2020-11-28 02:32:39)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,659

Re: Can not get this dual boot to work. Please Help!

Well he's technically doing that, though via a weird and roundabout way.

Post the exact commands of "exact same thing" (... and what you did to install the boot loader). There's no technical reason, safe for user input failures, that this would work with manjaro's GRUB and not with Arch's GRUB (one small exception might be if you've secureboot set up and I'm not sure on whether Manjaro would automatically set up a shim).

Note that if "exact same thing" and just changed the directory from /Manjaro to /Arch then that's the likely issue. There's no convention for this directory and it depends on the id you pass to the GRUB install command and you should double check your "second" ESP on what the paths actually are

Last edited by V1del (2020-11-28 03:23:16)

giselher_moe

Member

Registered: 2020-09-12

Posts: 4

Re: Can not get this dual boot to work. Please Help!

You ignored the advise of a respected member of the forum on this thread by creating multiple EFI partitions, made a mess of your installation, then expect people to spend time helping you?

There is literally no consensus on whether or not to reuse the same EFI. People have dual boots that work both ways and I have seen countless examples in real life and online of people using multiple EFIs. If you read my post you should have realized that it is something to do with the packages Arch supplies. There is something missing and that is why I am asking. If manjaro can do it in all of its bloatedness, then i'm sure it can be done with arch.

giselher_moe

Member

Registered: 2020-09-12

Posts: 4

Re: Can not get this dual boot to work. Please Help!

V1del this is a somewhat more descriptive install method:

For manjaro, I just let the bootstrapper do everything automatically.

For arch i just followed the guide to a t for a uefi system. I've done this many times before on single OS computers with other distros like gentoo and void and have had no trouble. I installed grub for a efi x86-64 system and generated a config as usual. I even ran osprober and efibootmgr to be certain that arch would be seen. I talked with an experienced friend yesterday and he said something along the lines of "run lsmod and see if there are any modules left out of the arch install". What do ya think?