Solved Dual booting with Linux and Windows via std blue boot screen

Hi folks
If you've got Linux and Windows you can use the standard Windows boot screen to boot into Linux as well as any Windows system(s) you have

just choose use a device and here ARCHLINUX is the Linux system I want to boot.





Note to capture the blue boot screen simply press your prtscreen button, then after booting up windows open word / wordpad, and ctrl-V will paste the image into the document which you can then capture with snipping tool etc. No need to mess around taking a photo with a moble phone etc.


Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

Note to capture the blue boot screen simply press your prtscreen button, then after booting up windows open word / wordpad, and ctrl-V will paste the image into the document which you can then capture with snipping tool etc. No need to mess around taking a photo with a moble phone etc.


Cheers
jimbo

Click to expand...

Hmm - that is interesting - I did not know you could do this as you are in a PE environment and have not yet selected a Windows session.

cheers.

With UEFI you can boot up anything using the Windows boot manager...

SlicEnDicE said:

With UEFI you can boot up anything using the Windows boot manager...

Click to expand...

I was referring to screenshots.

cereberus said:

I was referring to screenshots.

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I was referring to booting

From my personal experience using 11 Pro, if I attach any other OS, including 7 or 10, after a few boots with both os's hooked up, it eventually corrupts my 11 drive.

cereberus said:

Hmm - that is interesting - I did not know you could do this as you are in a PE environment and have not yet selected a Windows session.

cheers.

Click to expand...

Note though you can only capture one screen this way -- so if you want to show a sequence of screens then you need to find another way -- usually though it's just one screen that's of interest.

Cheers
jimbo

I used Grub to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu. You can set it so that the boot menu appears for ten seconds and then it boots into the last OS you used. This is handy if you reboot after Widown updates and you don't want to miss your slot. I even shortened the ten seconds to one second.

RD Mercer said:

From my personal experience using 11 Pro, if I attach any other OS, including 7 or 10, after a few boots with both os's hooked up, it eventually corrupts my 11 drive.

Click to expand...

It shouldn't -- especially if you have for the Linux systems a separate /boot directory -- i.e don't stick the whole lot under '/' (root). Also good to have the Windows boot for each system on it's own disk / partition and the main EFI one is for the primary EFI boot selector.

I've had no problem with this

cheers
jimbo

kelper said:

I used Grub to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu. You can set it so that the boot menu appears for ten seconds and then it boots into the last OS you used. This is handy if you reboot after Widown updates and you don't want to miss your slot. I even shortened the ten seconds to one second.

Click to expand...

Grub is fine too -- although I was assuming the primary OS loader was the Windows bootloader.

Note also some Linux distros are moving away from GRUB and using systemd as their OS loader -- as per Arch Linux / Manjaro / some debian based distros.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

It shouldn't -- especially if you have for the Linux systems a separate /boot directory -- i.e don't stick the whole lot under '/' (root). Also good to have the Windows boot for each system on it's own disk / partition and the main EFI one is for the primary EFI boot selector.

I've had no problem with this

cheers
jimbo

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Yeah, I haven't had any issues either...

jimbo45 said:

systemd

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This is not a boot loader and has nothing to do with GRUB.

SlicEnDicE said:

This is not a boot loader and has nothing to do with GRUB.

Click to expand...

Hi there
it's actually called systemd-boot which IS a boot loader


I was referring to the fact that GRUB is being replaced with other boot mechanisms - and the Windows OS boot menu from Use a device will just let the computers efi file for that system boot it whatever the boot loader is. However if your primary boot is Grub then Windows will appear as a boot option -- same with systemd-boot.

cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

It shouldn't -- especially if you have for the Linux systems a separate /boot directory -- i.e don't stick the whole lot under '/' (root). Also good to have the Windows boot for each system on it's own disk / partition and the main EFI one is for the primary EFI boot selector.

I've had no problem with this

cheers
jimbo

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I agree it shouldn’t. Let me elaborate on this a bit more. Ok, my windows 11 is on a M.2 drive, mounted on a PCIe card, all my other os’s are on regular sata drives. If I plug in for example, a regular sata drive with say, 7 or 10 or my 10 LTSB, after I go into my boot menu and boot from one of the sata drives a few times, then boot from my M.2, I have got the blue screen of death every time. I agree, it shouldn’t be a problem, but it is. Now since I don’t keep the door on my PC, I just pull the PCIe card out with the M.2 drive on it, and this works great.

Maybe it has something to do with my bios/board, who knows, but so far by pulling the PCIe card, this is works. I backup a lot just a habit, so it hasn’t been the end of the world if the windows 11 in the PCIe card is corrupted, but of course it would be better if I could boot from multiple drives without pulling the PCIe card. Again, yes it shouldn’t, never had this issue in the past with any OS, using the just the regular sata drives, with 7 or 10 on them. I don’t know if it’s the M.2 or Windows 11 or my boards bios doesn’t like this, or what, but it happens.

Edit: Forgot to mention, no, the sata port I’m using on the board, is the dedicated port for the boot drive, so it’s not shared with any other ports or PCIe slots.

Sounds to me you have multiple Windows bootloaders on your system in different places. An older one overwrites your newer one or your drive configuration changes in between boots and that's the downfall of Windows 11.

SlicEnDicE said:

Sounds to me you have multiple Windows bootloaders on your system in different places. An older one overwrites your newer one or your drive configuration changes in between boots and that's the downfall of Windows 11.

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I agree! This is what I have been thinking all this time.

jimbo45 said:

Hi there
it's actually called systemd-boot which IS a boot loader

Arch boot process - ArchWiki

wiki.archlinux.org

I was referring to the fact that GRUB is being replaced with other boot mechanisms - and the Windows OS boot menu from Use a device will just let the computers efi file for that system boot it whatever the boot loader is. However if your primary boot is Grub then Windows will appear as a boot option -- same with systemd-boot.

cheers
jimbo

Click to expand...

I have seen nothing to indicate that Linux distros are abandoning GRUB. I dual boot Fedora and Manjaro although I will say I have problems with GRUB on both. This is not the place to go into that. Another thing about Fedora 41 (and apparently 40) that annoys me is the move away from X!! on KDE 6. Manjaro still runs KDE 5 on X11 so I can use xscreensaver, which I I would rather have than VM which does not work at all on Kernel 6.8

Cheers

jimbo45 said:

If you've got Linux and Windows you can use the standard Windows boot screen to boot into Linux as well as any Windows system(s) you have

just choose use a device and here ARCHLINUX is the Linux system I want to boot.

Click to expand...

How did you add ArchLinux to the Windows Boot Manager?

I have Windows 11 on (/dev/nvme0p1) and ArchLinux on (/dev/sda1). I always relied on systemd-boot or GRUB when both OSes were on the same drive. I presumed you used BCDEDIT in Windows 11.

Note: I decided to join after reading these forums for years (Windows 7 to date).

Nipdawg said:

How did you add ArchLinux to the Windows Boot Manager?

I have Windows 11 on (/dev/nvme0p1) and ArchLinux on (/dev/sda1). I always relied on systemd-boot or GRUB when both OSes were on the same drive. I presumed you used BCDEDIT in Windows 11.

Note: I decided to join after reading these forums for years (Windows 7 to date).

Click to expand...

I didn't have to add anything - just from the Windows std blue boot manager choose Use a device

Disk Geometry : EFI (windows), Msr, Windows system EFI linux, linux /boot, linux '/' (root) linux /home

So Windows is "C" disk. Linux is on same drive but linux partitions /dev/sda1 -> /boot/efi, /dev/sda2 /boot, /dev/sda3 / (root) /dev/sda4 /home. with zram as swap.


Cheers
jimbo

martyfelker said:

I have seen nothing to indicate that Linux distros are abandoning GRUB. I dual boot Fedora and Manjaro although I will say I have problems with GRUB on both. This is not the place to go into that. Another thing about Fedora 41 (and apparently 40) that annoys me is the move away from X!! on KDE 6. Manjaro still runs KDE 5 on X11 so I can use xscreensaver, which I would rather have than VM which does not work at all on Kernel 6.8

Cheers

Click to expand...

Hi there
working fine for me on fedora 40 (pre beta) with Windows 11 Enterprise (canary) as the VM on kernel 6.8



Also if you do use say archlinux there's a script (run archinstall from the install image) and there's a guided series of questions including choice of bootloader.

I find I like this current version of fedora though -- I installed the SERVER version then added minimal kde (wayland-plasma, konsole, dolphin, kate (WHSIWYG edior), Nano instead of vi for edit of system files etc, firefox, and a few other goodies including a LAMP stack, samba, openssh, KVM/qemu, phpmyadmin. Nice lean mean KDE 6 desktop !! and wayland seems to work perfectly.

For a decent kde screensaver use spectacle. For multi-screen operation endure kscreen is installed and if you want to handle system files from things like dolphin then install kio-admin which then in the dolphin menu against a file / directory gives you an opption -- run as administrator e.g in root / super user mode).

I think although some of the practices of redhat / IBM might be questionable, that with their resources they've put together a very capable (still free) OS. - I prefer them any day of the week to Canonical (ubuntu) -- I'm not sure who maintains manjaro but if it follows archlinux I'm surprised they don't have a similar type of install script. I think also Fedora is slightly ahead of archlinux on the kernel but arch usually catches up. The Fedora update system is fine too -- simply sudo dnf upgrade does it and fetches all the new stuff from the testing repos -- remember it's pre-beta stuff. The rpmfusion repos (for all sorts of extra stuff) are up to rel 40 too.

Cheers
jimbo