Arch Linux

a_void

Member

From: France

Registered: 2022-05-08

Posts: 4

[SOLVED] Dualbooting with existing Arch install

Greetings Arch User Forum,

I've gotten a thinkpad a year ago and installed various distributions until i got stuck in love with arch, but due to school, some tools provided to me by the school don't work on the linux environment, (it could but i'm a newb to coding)

So I have archlinux on one partition of my SSD, that i shrunk to install windows 10, i've heard that it's recommended to install windows first and then linux to dualboot more easily, is this true?

Because i'd like to dualboot with the archlinux partition that i've already made, is it possible to reconfigure GRUB?

Tyvm in advance

Last edited by a_void (2022-11-16 13:45:46)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,657

Re: [SOLVED] Dualbooting with existing Arch install

The "install order" concerns were mostly relevant in the old BIOS days, on a proper UEFI setup Windows will simply install itself alongside GRUB, create a entry for itself and both can live in harmony and be selected from your EFI loader. Many EFI implementations are shit though, so how well this works will depend on this and you might want to disclose what mainboard/laptop model this is exactly.

Maybe post your current output of

efibootmgr -uv

so we know what you're dealing with.

The "worst" (assuming you don't erase the existing partition/select the wrong partition to install to during Windows setup) that can happen is that Windows occupies the same EFI entry as GRUB and will thus overwrite it, in which case you'll have to reinstall and reconfigure GRUB.

Last edited by V1del (2022-11-16 11:46:29)

a_void

Member

From: France

Registered: 2022-05-08

Posts: 4

Re: [SOLVED] Dualbooting with existing Arch install

Greetings V1del,

Thank you for your response

The thinkpad model I have is the T440p, after installing WIN10 on the same SSD (I used gparted to make the archlinux partition smaller, there is still the grub parition)

I can't boot into the linux environment, so I used the equivalent in windows:

bcdedit /enum firmware

Firmware Application (101fffff)
-------------------------------
identifier              {31d2bffc-64eb-11ed-896c-bd9aa835499c}
path                    \EFI\arch\grubx64.efi
description             arch
PS C:\Windows\system32> 

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,657

Re: [SOLVED] Dualbooting with existing Arch install

yeah that will work as well. If you went ahead and did that and it worked, please mark as [SOLVED] by editing the title in your first post.

a_void

Member

From: France

Registered: 2022-05-08

Posts: 4

Re: [SOLVED] Dualbooting with existing Arch install

yeah that will work as well. If you went ahead and did that and it worked, please mark as [SOLVED] by editing the title in your first post.

bcdedit /set '{bootmgr}' path \efi\grub\grubx64.efi 

This should work then, I never did this so it should work,

Last edited by a_void (2022-11-16 13:45:25)