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On my laptop I have W7 installed on sda2 (sda1 is a 100 MB partition that W7 makes by default). I installed arch and did

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
grub-install /dev/sda

I didn't think about W7, it's my firs time actually installing Arch outside a VM. I read that you should install grub on sda1 to be able to dualboot Windows and Arch. So my question is, is there anyway I can dualboot the two without having to reinstall Arch?

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  • I don't understand what the problem is. Its perfectly normal to use Grub instead of the Windows bootloader in a situation like this.
    – Ramhound
    Mar 17, 2014 at 18:13
  • Does your system boot at all now? I would think writing the bootloader to the front of the disk would blow away the partition data?
    – ernie
    Mar 17, 2014 at 18:31

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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You could just boot from the Arch Install-CD again and reinstall Grub, but as you have it already installed on sda you would need a greater afford to get the primitive state back, since you already have overwritten the MBR.

I'd suggest to leave Grub where it is and just chainload the Win7-bootloader from within Grub (there's a extensive ArchWiki-entry describing how to do this here).

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  • I tried following the wiki article but I almost ripped my hair out trying to understand it... but I googled around a little with help from that article and found a solution. :) Thank you for your help! askubuntu.com/questions/22629/add-windows-7-to-boot-menu
    – Dan Lindqvist
    Mar 17, 2014 at 19:54
  • Yeah, I loved helping you. Thanks for the downvote, though. Love that too.
    – Andreas Wiese
    Mar 24, 2014 at 20:22
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I found two solutions, the easiest was doing pacman -S os-prober && grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg. The other I found via Andreas post...

I tried following the wiki article Andreas posted but I almost ripped my hair out trying to understand it... but I googled around a little with help from that article and found a solution.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/22629/add-windows-7-to-boot-menu/22632#22632

I backed up my /boot/grub/grub.cfg, then edited it and added the code from the post I just linked. Now I can boot up Windows and Arch (I could always boot Arch, but...). :)

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