Dual Boot Arch-Windows

[Lowseling]

Hello everyone,

 

I have a question about dual booting. Recently I bought an NVME SSD in which I installed archlinux. The HDD that came with my computer contains Windows instead. During the installation procedure of Arch I removed my HDD, just to prevent "accidents", my Windows HDD had all my files in it and I decided to recover the files later (like I already did). I've still not formatted my HDD, and now I need to boot into windows to update my motherboard's firmware (my computer is an HP Omen and, for some reason, they only provide .exe files to update the firmware). In order to do it I thought: "I can just re-enable safe-boot so Windows is happy and, in the boot device menu, just select the HDD instead of the SSD", but I can't, Windows won't boot, my computer just gives me a black screen, reboot and boot from the SSD automatically. I tried to enable/disable safe boot, I tried to change the boot device order, nothing works, it'll only boot from my NVME SSD.

Now, to solve the issue I can simply remove my SSD, but I was wondering if there is another way to solve this issue and use both OSs for now (just the time of some windows-only HP updates), I'm not really an expert of BIOS/UEFI configurations. Can you help me?

 

Have a nice day,

Giuseppe

 

P.S. - After I use windows for this updates I want to remove it from my PC and use the HDD as archive storage, so I don't really want to update my systemd-boot configuration, if there is no other solutions I would prefer to simply unplug my SSD

[clinkydoodle]

Hi, not sure if its helpful, but most firmware update exe's are just self extracting, so if you extract the .exe with whatever app you would normally use to extract a zip (I use 7zip normally), you'll likely find the file to flash it with. Put that on your USB stick and away you go.

I know it doesn't help with your dual boot issue, but means you'll at least be able to flash the bios.

 

Looking at all the troubleshooting you've done already, I might come to the conclusion that you Windows install is corrupt and you'll need a fresh windows install (or recover from an ISO backup if you have one) on a partition on the NVME like you said you were planning on anyway. You can then get rid of the HDD, although it might come in handy for bulk file storage or as a game or media library or something.