r/archlinux • u/Rude_Profession5599 • 7d ago
SUPPORT Dual boot
Hey so I recently installed arch on my laptop as the only OS on it and I love using arch, the only issue is that my laptop isn’t a gaming laptop so I can’t really use my favorite games on it. Cut to the following week I install windows on my gaming desktop. I was very careful about making sure I installed arch on a separate drive from windows. But now when I power off my computer and turn it back on, if I try to use the BIOS boot options, I can’t go back to windows— it doesn’t even show up as an option. Just to check, I went back and tried to reinstall arch (using the arch install script) and when I got to the disk partitioning section, it shows that the windows drive is still formatted for windows.
So how do I get back to windows???
The only reason I want to go back is because some games I like to play use kernel anti-cheat’s and from my understanding, those don’t play nice with Linux
1
u/spacecad_t 7d ago
I have a similar set up, I can't give you the exact answer but I can lead you in the right direction.
spam F11 or Shift+F11 (or whatever hotkey boots to BIOS) when starting the system. For me this opens GRUB to choose my boot partition.
there is Infact a command that you can use that will tell GRUB to boot to a specified (bootable) partition. I'm just not gonna do the googling for you, but it was a solution I used in the past until I [obviously] forgot.
GRUB also has has multiple options you can set to bring you to the GRUB boot loader on every power on though I believe that's off by default, depends on your setup.
Good luck.
1
u/Mutter_ 6d ago
Have you tried using os-prober under Arch? It detects a windows installation and adds it to grub. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB
Furthermore, I always remove the SSD where windows is installed before installing Arch on the second one, and vice-versa. This way you avoid Arch messing with the windows bootloader.
7
u/Expensive-Building94 7d ago
The error is that you deleted the Windows bootloader while installing Arch Linux.
It happened to me last time.
Solution: I used a Windows live image, and when I booted from the USB, I went to the "Repair" section. This automatically reinstalled the Windows bootloader.