Hey everyone, I’ve recently been trying to go back to a dual boot setup with Windows and Arch. I would fully switch to Arch, but unfortunately there are still a few things I need access to that either don’t have a FOSS alternative that meets my needs or won’t run through WINE/Proton.

I used to already have a dual boot setup but recently had to buy a new motherboard, which also involved getting a new CPU, so I ended up wiping everything and just riding on Windows for a while, but I did make sure to give Windows’ boot partition enough space knowing that I was planning on dual booting again soon.

I figured it was all going to be easy-peasy as I’ve done it before and it worked with no problems at all. However, after installing Arch the same way I’d done before and rebooting my PC, it booted straight to Windows, completely skipping GRUB.

I went the lazy route and used Archinstall, which received a UI update since last time I used it so I figured maybe the process changed and I messed it up by not noticing it. So I tried again, this time taking the manual install route… same result.

No GRUB entry would show up on UEFI so I figured maybe it installed in the wrong location or I messed it up again somehow. Booted on the Arch ISO, mounted the EFI partition to check it, both GRUB Windows’ boot manager are there.

After a quick search I found that some motherboard might need you to toggle secure boot on and back off to force it to check for bootloaders. It apparently specifically applies to Acer motherboards, both of my motherboards are Asus (old one was TUF Gaming x570-Pro, new one is ROG Strix x870-F Gaming) but I figured I’d give it a try.

Only way I managed to get anything else to show up was by enabling CSM, then a second “boot” entry on that drive would show up. But it seems that “boot” entry is just the drive itself because when I tried to boot from it, it just gave me that dreaded screen that tells you it couldn’t find anything to boot, to plug in a bootable drive and press enter.

I tried again via Archinstall, this time picking systemd-boot since during my search earlier i found that systemd-boot is apparently easier to set up a dual boot than GRUB… same result. My PC just won’t see Linux bootloaders, it seems.

The only way I managed to make it “work” was by making a second EFI partition on that same drive, leaving the Windows boot partition untouched and giving Arch its own boot partition. By “work” I mean I could finally get systemd-boot to launch, but if I wanted to boot into Windows, I’d have to boot into UEFI and switch the boot devices priorities around, which, while better than nothing, is far from ideal.

In doing so I also noticed that the systemd-boot entry showed up the same way as the “empty drive” entry did earlier when I enabled CSM, might be normal, nit-picking, figured it was worth mentioning.

The way my UEFI is currently set up is:

• CSM disabled
• Secure Boot > OS Type > Other OS
• Secure Boot mode > Standard

That’s the way I had it set up on my old motherboard back when dual boot worked, and it’s the way it needs to be set up for secure boot to be disabled according to Asus support posts I found.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I might be doing wrong?

Additionally, somewhat unrelated but something I found when messing around with Archinstall is that if I set Archinstall to automatically partition everything using BTRFS, it generates 5 subvolumes, one of which is @.snapshots, but if I try to manually replicate that set up (because the automatic one wants to wipe the whole drive and I don’t want that because I want to keep Windows), it won’t let me make a @.snapshots subvolume. Is this important at all? If so, can I add it post-install?

Thanks in advance! And happy new year!