Sunday, April 28, 2013

Dual booting Arch Linux + Windows 7

This is assuming that you have Arch installed on its own hdd, and same with windows.  To install windows, just plug in the hard drive to which you intend to install windows 7.   After installation, plug in both hard drives again, making sure you make Arch linux primary and the windows 7 slave.

Boot up arch linux, and install os-probe:

# pacman -S os-probe


Then run the mkconfig command, to rebuild your grub config file:

# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg


WARNING:

If you end up having duplicate entries in your grub menu for Windows 7, check the files in which you can add  custom menu entries. For my computer, I had a manual entry under the file /etc/grub.d/40_custom

All you have to do is open up the file and take out whatever entry is already in there.


# nano /etc/grub.d/40_custom 


The re-reun the mkconfig command above, and you should be good 2 go.

To me it seems like the arch wiki makes this a more complicated problem than it should be.