Arch Linux

jfabernathy

Member

From: North Carolina

Registered: 2019-01-03

Posts: 123

[SOLVED] dual boot with windows 10 2nd drive

My goal is to have Windows 10 and Archlinux dual-booting each on separate drives.

The current situation is the Dell XPS 15 9500 came with Windows 10 and I installed a 2nd nvme drive. About a year ago I found some instructions on dual booting Ubuntu and I followed them and I now have Ubuntu and Windows able to boot with Ubuntu as the default.

However, I'm not sure exactly what would be needed to change to Archlinux instead of Ubuntu.  I can install Archlinux on a VM or as the single OS on a PC so I should be able to do this.

I wanted to ask for help now before I screwed things up.

What I know is:

1.  RST and Secure Boot are turned off.
2.  When Ubuntu is running lsblk shows that
     /dev/nvme0n1p1 is mounted to /boot/efi
     /dev/nvme0n1p2 is mounted to /

     /dev/nvme1n1p1 is the EFI partition for the original Windows drive
     /dev/nvme1n1p3 is the OS partition for the original Windows drive

3.  In the BIOS setup the boot order is listed as:
     Ubuntu
     Windows Boot Manager
     UEFI    "model name of windows drive"
     UEFI    "model name of Linux drive"
     
4.  If I change the boot priority to Windows Boot MGR first, then Windows boots directly without Grub.

My first guess is that after booting the Archlinux installation USB drive, I should mkfs.vfat  the EFI partition on /dev/nvme0n1p1 and  mkfs.ext4 the partition on /dev/nvme0n1p2.

Then mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 to /mnt, then mkdir /mnt/efi and mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 to /mnt/efi.

At this point a normal Archlinux install should work.

So am I missing anything??

P.S. this is a lot of work so I can have one system available to run 1 Windows program a few times a year :-)

Last edited by jfabernathy (2021-08-19 20:44:14)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,088

Re: [SOLVED] dual boot with windows 10 2nd drive

If the EFI partition is shared with Windows then do not mkfs it. Just remove Ubuntu's GRUB and install Arch's GRUB on there. Other than that the general steps read fine.

jfabernathy

Member

From: North Carolina

Registered: 2019-01-03

Posts: 123

Re: [SOLVED] dual boot with windows 10 2nd drive

If the EFI partition is shared with Windows then do not mkfs it. Just remove Ubuntu's GRUB and install Arch's GRUB on there. Other than that the general steps read fine.

From what I can tell the original EFI partition for windows only is still unmodified on /dev/nvme1n1p1.  The drive with Linux on it is /dev/nvme0n1 and the EFI partition on that drive is /dev/nvme0n1p1.  That is the partition I would format so it's clean for Archlinux and grub. 

I think that during the install process that os-prober will add the Windows Boot Manager to the grub entries which must be what Ubuntu did. I can see no evidence that the original windows EFI partition on the original drive got modified. 

It seems that  in my case Archlinux would only be installed on /dev/nvme0n1 and os-prober would find Windows on the other drive and include the boot entry along with Arch.

jfabernathy

Member

From: North Carolina

Registered: 2019-01-03

Posts: 123

Re: [SOLVED] dual boot with windows 10 2nd drive

I went ahead with my install and it worked fine.  Once minor exception which I will note for others.

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg     gave a warning/error about os-prober not running. In researching, for some reason, you need to add a line to the /etc/default/grub file that reads:

GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false

Once that was done, grub-mkconfig ran and found Archlinux and Windows 10.

I used a youtube video as a guide except for the disk partitioning part. EFLInux.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1B1O0R1IHA

Last edited by jfabernathy (2021-08-19 17:30:37)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,088

Re: [SOLVED] dual boot with windows 10 2nd drive

ah whoops yeah I misread that. Please mark it as [SOLVED] by editing the title in your first post.