[SOLVED] Dual boot windows 7 and arch Linux with seperate hard drives

Ok so I'm stuck trying to get my computer to dual boot windows 7 and arch. They are installed on different hard drives and I have grub 2 as the boot loader. I can't find any tutorials on how to do it with seperate hard drives I know how to do it if they are on the same hard drive. Also I want windows on the "first" hard drive how do I check to see which one it considers the first?
Last edited by bdawg (2012-09-21 23:15:37)

DSpider wrote:
drobole wrote:If you want to change it so that sda becomes sdb and sdb becomes sda, you should be able to do that in BIOS.
Not from the BIOS. He would need to physically open up the computer and switch the cables between them (or add another drive).
There's no actual performance increase in changing this order. Performance increase is when you have the partitions as close to the beginning of a HDD as possible, where the platters spin faster (basic mechanics, not to be confused with CD/DVD, which are being written from the inside-out to prevent errors after extended usage), and it especially doesn't apply to SSDs whatsoever.
You may be right about that. I remember I had to do this a while back but I probably switched the cables. It also messed up the drive mapping in Windows 98 if I remember correctly.

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  • [SOLVE] Dual Boot Windows and ArchLinux with Syslinux

    Ok, i installed ArchLinux on my laptop with Windows XP (syslinux) and I cannot find get Windows to boot or mount it. I have tried to do what i can to do this but cannot. I Installed XP first like a should and something i think might be needed to know is after i created the partitions scheme (10Gb (boot partition), 50GB (XP), 80GB(was unallocated)). The installation disk formated both 2 partitions in NTFS but i installed XP on the second and Windows reported them as C and D drives. Windows being D. Thought that was bit werid thinking Windows installed the mbr on that partition. When I installed ArchLinux, it did have the boot flag set on 10GB (or C drive).
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    NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
    sda 8:0 0 149.1G 0 disk
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    |-sda2 8:2 0 1K 0 part
    |-sda3 8:3 0 53.6G 0 part
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    Last edited by jag-ster (2014-11-27 02:12:12)

    Here is the partition table:
    /dev/sda1 one HUGE linux /boot primary partition (assuming ext4)
    /dev/sda2 "name" of the extended partition
    /dev/sda3 primary Windows partition (assuming NTFS)
    /dev/sda5 logical Linux root partition (assuming ext4)
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    Windows problem:
    The /dev/sda1 which Windows named C: is Windows equivalent of linux /boot. When you told linux to place its /boot on /dev/sda1 it formated boot files of Windows. Now you have Windows OS with no kernel. In other words there is no way to boot Windows if you don't reinstall it. Actually there is a way, but you would than screw up Arch.
    Mounting problem:
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    EDIT:
    Try it this way:
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    - Let Windows make another partition
    - Make one more so you could have a data partition, which does not need to be formated to reinstall Windows
    - Start Arch installation
    - Get to partitioning
        =Partitioning=
        - /dev/sda4 extended (take the rest of the drive)
        - /dev/sda5 logical /boot 512MiB
        - /dev/sda6 logical /          20GiB
        - /dev/sda7 logical /home (the rest)
    Making a separate /home partition will come in handy when reinstalling Arch (any linux distribution), or switching between distros, because it is the equivalent of D:/ in Windows. Also consider LVM.
    Last edited by bstaletic (2014-02-28 23:25:33)

  • Dual Booting Windows and Arch (SOLVED!)

    Hello all, I'm having trouble getting a windows partition activated again. (Windows was on here for many years, then I installed arch on a separate partition.)
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    Disk identifier: 0x00000000
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    initrd /boot/kernel26.img
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    Last edited by mongoose088 (2008-12-20 21:48:18)

    I read up on some documentation of installing GRUB to the MBR.
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    Last edited by mongoose088 (2008-12-20 05:41:43)

  • [SOLVED] Dual Boot Window 7 & Arch on a Uefi system.

    From the Wiki
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    Last edited by Some Arch Lovin (2014-06-14 08:53:14)

    A few issues with the dual boot setup
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    I'll do them one at a time but I want to know from the admins if I should start a new thread? Because in a way this thread accomplished it job i.e. win7 and arch dual booting in uefi system.
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    My gummiboot is not working on startup. I have to press f12 and use bios booting menu to boot. The problem with that is if I put Windows at the top of the boot priority the bios does not show F12 and F2 at the time of booting up so I can't access the boot menu. I have to boot into Windows and crash it by holding the power button and then the F12 options shows up and I am able to boot into Arch. If I put Arch at the top then Windows keeps restoring back to an earlier version due to start up options.
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    Last edited by Archer61 (2014-06-11 13:48:56)

  • Dual Boot Vista and Arch

    Hey, I am attempting to set up my laptop to dual boot Windows Vista and Arch Linux.
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    Mclarenf1905 wrote:
    Hey, I am attempting to set up my laptop to dual boot Windows Vista and Arch Linux.
    The problem I'm having is after installing Arch my laptop still boots windows w/o going to the grub
    I started with having Windows Vista installed on the laptop, and then shrank down the partition with vista by 30 gigs for Arch.
    I was following the Arch setup guide in the wiki along with the Dual Boot Windows and Arch guide in the wiki [wiki]Windows_and_Arch_Dual_Boot[/wiki].
    My partitioning Scheme is:
    /dev/sda1    1.46 gb (some sort of toshiba recovery partition I believe)
    /dev/sda2    117.8 gb (Vista Partition)
    /dev/sda3    1 gb (Swap partition)
    /dev/sda4    29 gb /root partition
    According to the Dual Boot wiki article, I should install the grub to /boot, which in my case is in /root which I did.
    The thing that confuses me about this is if I install the grub to /boot how do I get the grub to boot before the windows MBR?
    Thanks in advanced
    It still works fine. It doesn't matter if its not in root directory. Others linux OSes  have their bootloaders in the same directory and it manages to boot just fine.

  • Dual Booting Windows and Solaris

    Hi
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    how do i make sure that Windows and Solaris appear in my boot options..?
    Is their a guide on doing this...?
    Thanks
    Liam

    Hey I did a quick google search for you. So I havent tried this method myself but it sounds reasonable.
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  • Dual booting Windows 8 and Arch Linux with UEFI

    Hi all!
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    sudo make sandwich wrote:If it is possible to share ESP between OSes, how do I do this (would it be sufficent to follow this section: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners'_Guide#For_UEFI_motherboards)?
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  • [SOLVED] dual booting windows 7 with btrfs on grub-bios -- core.img

    I am trying to install arch in a dual boot configuration with an existing windows 7 partition. I have everything from the beginner's guide done but the bootloader. When I run grub-install it tells me that core.img is too big.
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    Last edited by jorenko (2013-06-09 03:53:24)

    Well there's your problem, your first partition starts at sector 63.  With recent versions of windows and fdisk (and every other partitioning tool I can think of off the top of my head) things now align themselves correctly.  Also because there is now GPT, the first partition typically starts later as the GPT partition table will typically sit between the MBR and the first partition. 
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    [sudo] password for curtisshima:
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    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
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    # Start End Size Type Name
    1 2048 2099199 1G EFI System EFI System
    2 2099200 252166798 119.2G Linux filesyste arch-btrfs-1
    3 252168192 488397134 112.7G Linux filesyste arch-btrfs-3
    Note that I do use GPT.  But that is not the point here. What I am trying to show is where my first partition starts.  This is also where fdisk will start partitions these days.  This is to ensure compatibility with 4k advanced format disks.
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    The other option is to use grub-legacy, which can still be found in the AUR.  I actually liked the orginal Grub, as it provided a nice feature set, but was still configurable by hand and it actually fit into the MBR.

  • Dual booting Windows 7 & Arch...

    I have 2 SATA hard drives on my system...
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    Heres how I do it:
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