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#1 2020-12-10 10:53:03

absortio
Member
Registered: 2020-12-10
Posts: 12

[SOLVED] can't boot into windows after installing arch

Hi,

(Firstly, apologize for my bad english)
I've been using arch for a while but I recently found out that I can't boot into windows 10.
The first problem is I can't find the windows 10 entry in grub menu. I tried to manually add the windows 10 menuentry into grub's custom.cfg but it didn't seem to work.
Second problem is that appearently I can't find any windows boot loader on my /boot directory (efi partition). My feeling was that I did most thing wrong when installing arch, possibly formatted the efi partition. As you can see:

/boot
├── EFI
│   ├── EFI
│   │   └── arch
│   │       └── grubx64.efi
│   └── grub_uefi
│       └── grubx64.efi
└── grub
    ├── custom.cfg
    ├── fonts
    │   └── unicode.pf2
    ├── grubenv
    ├── locale
    │   ├── ast.mo
    │   ├── ca.mo
    │   ├── da.mo
    │   ├── de_CH.mo
    │   ├── de@hebrew.mo
    │   ├── de.mo
    │   ├── en@arabic.mo
    │   ├── en@cyrillic.mo
    │   ├── en@greek.mo
    │   ├── en@hebrew.mo
    │   ├── en@piglatin.mo
    │   ├── en@quot.mo
    │   ├── eo.mo
    │   ├── es.mo
    │   ├── fi.mo
    │   ├── fr.mo
    │   ├── gl.mo
    │   ├── hr.mo
    │   ├── hu.mo
    │   ├── id.mo
    │   ├── it.mo
    │   ├── ja.mo
    │   ├── ko.mo
    │   ├── lg.mo
    │   ├── lt.mo
    │   ├── nb.mo
    │   ├── nl.mo
    │   ├── pa.mo
    │   ├── pl.mo
    │   ├── pt_BR.mo
    │   ├── pt.mo
    │   ├── ro.mo
    │   ├── ru.mo
    │   ├── sl.mo
    │   ├── sr.mo
    │   ├── sv.mo
    │   ├── tr.mo
    │   ├── uk.mo
    │   ├── vi.mo
    │   ├── zh_CN.mo
    │   └── zh_TW.mo
    ├── themes
    │   └── starfield
    │       ├── blob_w.png
    │       ├── boot_menu_c.png
    │       ├── boot_menu_e.png
    │       ├── boot_menu_ne.png
    │       ├── boot_menu_n.png
    │       ├── boot_menu_nw.png
    │       ├── boot_menu_se.png
    │       ├── boot_menu_s.png
    │       ├── boot_menu_sw.png
    │       ├── boot_menu_w.png
    │       ├── COPYING.CC-BY-SA-3.0
    │       ├── dejavu_10.pf2
    │       ├── dejavu_12.pf2
    │       ├── dejavu_14.pf2
    │       ├── dejavu_16.pf2
    │       ├── dejavu_bold_14.pf2
    │       ├── README
    │       ├── slider_c.png
    │       ├── slider_n.png
    │       ├── slider_s.png
    │       ├── starfield.png
    │       ├── terminal_box_c.png
    │       ├── terminal_box_e.png
    │       ├── terminal_box_ne.png
    │       ├── terminal_box_n.png
    │       ├── terminal_box_nw.png
    │       ├── terminal_box_se.png
    │       ├── terminal_box_s.png
    │       ├── terminal_box_sw.png
    │       ├── terminal_box_w.png
    │       └── theme.txt
    └── x86_64-efi
        ├── acpi.mod
        ├── adler32.mod
        ├── affs.mod
        ├── afs.mod
        ├── ahci.mod
        ├── all_video.mod
        ├── aout.mod
etc..

Additionally, I can't seem to boot using bootable USB which I use in my try to reinstall windows.
I really have not much idea about this, so any help would be extremely appreciated!

Last edited by absortio (2020-12-11 13:08:24)

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#2 2020-12-10 14:26:37

kocotian
Member
From: Łaguszów, Poland
Registered: 2020-07-24
Posts: 40
Website

Re: [SOLVED] can't boot into windows after installing arch

Hello.
Do you have `efibootmgr` and `os-prober` packages installed? Write `lsblk` and give output, so we can see what partitions you have on drive, windows's boot partition can be formatted.
And do you use MBR or GPT? Windows doesn't support GPT, so this can be a problem.

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#3 2020-12-10 14:30:13

Scimmia
Fellow
Registered: 2012-09-01
Posts: 13,729

Re: [SOLVED] can't boot into windows after installing arch

If you formatted the Windows ESP, you'll have to talk to people that do Windows support.

Of course Windows supports GPT. In fact, it requires it for UEFI.

Edit: make sure you didn't just create a second ESP.

Last edited by Scimmia (2020-12-10 14:31:28)

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#4 2020-12-10 14:37:57

kocotian
Member
From: Łaguszów, Poland
Registered: 2020-07-24
Posts: 40
Website

Re: [SOLVED] can't boot into windows after installing arch

Scimmia wrote:

If you formatted the Windows ESP, you'll have to talk to people that do Windows support.

Of course Windows supports GPT. In fact, it requires it for UEFI.

Edit: make sure you didn't just create a second ESP.

I recently had to dual boot arch and windows for friend, and on installation process, installer said that GPT is not supported, maybe something changed, because that probably was older ISO of Windows 10

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#5 2020-12-10 14:41:27

Scimmia
Fellow
Registered: 2012-09-01
Posts: 13,729

Re: [SOLVED] can't boot into windows after installing arch

kocotian wrote:
Scimmia wrote:

If you formatted the Windows ESP, you'll have to talk to people that do Windows support.

Of course Windows supports GPT. In fact, it requires it for UEFI.

Edit: make sure you didn't just create a second ESP.

I recently had to dual boot arch and windows for friend, and on installation process, installer said that GPT is not supported, maybe something changed, because that probably was older ISO of Windows 10

It's not supported for BIOS installations, that's probably what you were seeing.

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#6 2020-12-10 23:08:54

absortio
Member
Registered: 2020-12-10
Posts: 12

Re: [SOLVED] can't boot into windows after installing arch

kocotian wrote:

Hello.
Do you have `efibootmgr` and `os-prober` packages installed? Write `lsblk` and give output, so we can see what partitions you have on drive, windows's boot partition can be formatted.
And do you use MBR or GPT? Windows doesn't support GPT, so this can be a problem.

I do. This is the output of lsblk:

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 931.5G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   260M  0 part /boot
├─sda2   8:2    0    16M  0 part 
├─sda3   8:3    0 149.4G  0 part 
├─sda4   8:4    0   280G  0 part 
├─sda5   8:5    0 390.6G  0 part 
├─sda6   8:6    0   650M  0 part 
├─sda7   8:7    0     4G  0 part [SWAP]
├─sda8   8:8    0    20G  0 part /
└─sda9   8:9    0  86.6G  0 part /home
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom

As a note, sda3 is the windows root partition

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#7 2020-12-10 23:25:43

absortio
Member
Registered: 2020-12-10
Posts: 12

Re: [SOLVED] can't boot into windows after installing arch

Scimmia wrote:

If you formatted the Windows ESP, you'll have to talk to people that do Windows support.

I haven't talked to them yet, but I find the way is to recover them with windows installation media, most likely requiring my device to boot from a bootable USB drive. Although, as I stated earlier, the option to boot from it is nowhere to found on my BIOS. When I tried to manually add a new boot option, it shows directories on my ESP and nothing about the USB drive. I'm sure that I properly setup the USB, I tried using woeusb also rufus (from other device) but the result just same. As a note, it does read my USB just fine, it shows up on my BIOS but not as a bootable device.


Scimmia wrote:

Edit: make sure you didn't just create a second ESP.

Pretty sure I didn't, I was following the wiki instructions so most likely I formatted the first partition.

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#8 2020-12-11 00:21:53

bobbluegreen
Member
Registered: 2020-12-03
Posts: 1

Re: [SOLVED] can't boot into windows after installing arch

Full disclaimer, I'm the noob-est of noobs when it comes to arch. I've worked with CentOS, ubuntu, and Mint in the past, so have a few years spent working with linux. But, that being said, I've been doing a bunch of reading on how to set up a machine for dual boot arch/windows. One of the things that I've learned is that you will still need a separate EFI partition for your arch install (so you'll need a total of two EFI partitions on your machine, one for windows boot and one for arch boot). You'll also need to mount your windows efi partition within the arch root directory and make sure that it is configured with GRUB (if that's the bootloader you used) so that os-prober can find it during machine boot. If you formatted the windows EFI partition with mkfs.fat then you may have ruined your windows system. This youtube video has a great tutorial on how to properly install and configure a dual boot windows10/arch machine (redacted).

Mod note: -- Removed youtube video guide

Last edited by V1del (2020-12-11 00:46:29)

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#9 2020-12-11 00:45:38

V1del
Forum Moderator
Registered: 2012-10-16
Posts: 25,353

Re: [SOLVED] can't boot into windows after installing arch

@bobbluegreen While it's appreciated that you are trying to help, everything you've said in this post is simply incorrect, and please don't link to youtube video guides, they are not supported here.


Really the plan here is pretty simple, if you've indeed formatted the ESP completely you need to get these Windows files there, this is possible with a bootable Windows USB, iirc there is even a "official" Microsoft provided flashing tool for recovery USBs. In any case this really doesn't seem to be Arch related.

I'm debating closing this, but will leave this open for now, should you have issues after recovering these files and then having a problem with GRUB configuration.

Last edited by V1del (2020-12-11 00:59:01)

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#10 2020-12-11 03:50:11

absortio
Member
Registered: 2020-12-10
Posts: 12

Re: [SOLVED] can't boot into windows after installing arch

@V1del I understand that it's It's getting out of topic, so I appreciate it! A little bit update, now I'm trying to recover the files using a bootable USB drive.
The problem was I don't have the option to boot from it, so currently I'm trying to boot the USB from GRUB. I came across an error though: 

filepath: {path here..}
Grub error: cannot load image

seems like it's caused by a GRUB bug or.. just simply corrupted drive. I'll try to use another drive, also might try using another boot manager.

EDIT: most solutions I find is to disable secure boot. It didn't work for me.

Last edited by absortio (2020-12-11 03:53:28)

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#11 2020-12-11 08:08:37

seth
Member
From: Won't reply 2 private help req
Registered: 2012-09-03
Posts: 77,652

Re: [SOLVED] can't boot into windows after installing arch

Change the boot order in the UEFI/BIOS to boot from the USB device - this should™ not relate to any boot loader.
Then fix yoru windows installation.

How to upload text · How to boot w/o GUI · Disable Windows Fast-Start! · Fix your xinitrc

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#12 2020-12-11 13:07:55

absortio
Member
Registered: 2020-12-10
Posts: 12

Re: [SOLVED] can't boot into windows after installing arch

seth wrote:

Change the boot order in the UEFI/BIOS to boot from the USB device - this should™ not relate to any boot loader.

I got a problem trying to do that, the USB device doesn't show on the boot order or on efibootmgr at all. I thought this is related with "grub-bug" I found earlier.
Anyway, I got this fixed just recently by installing rEFInd. I don't quite understand how, but after finished installing rEFInd, it finally shows. Most of my problem is sorted out, so I'm gonna mark it as solved.

Thanks guys

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