Arch Linux

ohgodmanyo

Member

Registered: 2021-07-02

Posts: 18

Arch on one drive, Windows on the other.

I was wondering what are the repercussions of having arch already installed to one drive in my pc, and then installing windows on a whole other drive on my pc. To be clear, I will not have the two on two partitions on a single drive. They will both be on separate drives. I have already referred to https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dual_boot_with_Windows. However, most of the entries are referring to a single drive with two partitions setup. What do I have to look out for when installing Windows to a second drive?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,263

Re: Arch on one drive, Windows on the other.

Generally not much, if you only have one ESP Windows might want to use it as well, if you have a proper UEFI implementation and you were able to configure a custom NVRAM entry then Windows should simply add it's own boot loader and everything will Just work™

In the case that you don't have a proper UEFI it might make Windows boot first, or if you don't have a good EFI to the degree of tha it only boots the fallback path esp/EFI/BOOTx64.efi Windows will generally override that and you might have to reinstall your bootloader.

If you want to ensure Windows creates/uses it's own ESP on the other disk you might have to explicitly create one/check the advanced settings on whether you can configure where Windows creates one.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,480

Website

Re: Arch on one drive, Windows on the other.

Nothing as long as you use a boot loader / manager that can load an OS from another device (which really really should be all of them, but one or two of them are ridiculously complex yet still suck at doing simple things).

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

ohgodmanyo

Member

Registered: 2021-07-02

Posts: 18

Re: Arch on one drive, Windows on the other.

Thanks everyone for your help. Solved.

JaydenDev

Member

Registered: 2022-07-11

Posts: 172

Re: Arch on one drive, Windows on the other.

Thanks everyone for your help. Solved.

Please add [Solved] to the beginning of the title to reflect the status of this topic.

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