I have a laptop on which I installed arch and created two partitions (I have a 1TB HDD), first partition of size 1G (swap) and a second partition that takes the rest of the space for system and personal data. After a while I decided to create a partition for Windows, so I made a bootable Gparted usb and shrunk the second partition by 256 GB. I successfully installed Windows on the newly created partition, but the problem is now when I boot my computer the Linux install doesn’t show up at all in the boot menu. Disk management on Windows detects the Linux partitions but I can’t access my previous install. Is there any solution ?
It’s a known Microsoft tactic at this point. Installing Windows after Linux will wipe your bootloader (grub, systemd-boot etc.). Installing Linux after Windows will enable it, but on Windows updates, Microsoft will delete it again.
It’s best to install the Linux bootloader on a different device, even on an SD card or USB flash drive. Just make sure that the other storage is always plugged in when you are booted into Linux.
To fix it, chroot into arch and reinstall grub, or change the boot partition, copy the stuff from the old /boot and slap install grub on the sd / usb drive.
Thanks for your help, this is my second bad experience with dual booting windows and linux, I wouldn’t have installed windows if I didn’t really need to anyway.
Yes, microsoft will make it as painful as possible to dual-boot. The best experience is to run Windows in a VM in arch using virt-manager. For advanced users, VFIO / GPU Passthrough is where it’s at (and how I run windows).
