Dual Boot + easyBCD = dumped to GRUB4DOS - Help fix please.

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Good morning, i’ll try to be quick and concise:

Having problems getting Antergos to boot post install, while using EasyBCD to set-up boot menu options within Win 10 boot manager.

The reason I DO NOT want to let Antergos Live USB edit the win10 MBR is because I’ve had headaches with it before, to the point where I had to fix MBR’s and sometimes lost WIN installs. I’d like to avoid those situations by having control of the environment in a fashion which I’m a lil bit more familiar with (EasyBCD).

Coming from Elementary OS install, this one is proving a bit tougher to get up and running out of the box. On Elementary OS, I’ve been able to just set up /root /home /swap, finish the install, boot into WIN10, use EasyBCD to manually point it to root partition, and boot Elementary.

This method does not seem to work with Antergos, and I’m wondering if there’s a way to get it to work this way. (I really want to avoid letting Linux modify the WIN MBR on install).

The bootmenu ends up looking something like this (http://prog-city.ru/uploads/posts/2012-09/1348685167_easybcd.png) which does not seem to work.

While looking for a solution on forums here, I found this article, which I have not tried yet. - https://forum.antergos.com/topic/9275/stop-using-boot-partition-and-use-root-partition-instead so I can’t comment on weather this will work or not yet.

If anyone knows a solution to this, please help. Thank you in advance!

Some things I noticed might be of importance:

• Live USB for Antergos does trigger some sort of “modified/can’t boot” error/warning, have to switch to non Windows/EFI security to get it to boot.

• Wondering if i’m running into these issues because this Distro is running release and not LTS?

Again, thank you for your time/help! - Can’t wait to see if I can get this distro up and running.

As a small addition to the topic, how does a EFI, non-EFI, boot menus, GRUB2, GRUB Legacy, other boot loader options effect the idea of Dual Booting, and what is considered to be the best use-case for dual booting with Win10?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NeoGRUB

@joekamprad

Thank you, I will test this when I get home.

As a side note, is there another tool other than EasyBCD that is better supported by Antergos, or recommended for setting these boot menus via Windows?

i do never use thouse… and as i understand also easyBCD is writing something inside the windows boot sections… so i do not see what it do better or more save then efiboot or grub itself… if you are running DOS-MBR system you can also simple backup the windows MBR and in a hurry copy it back in its original state if something went wrong…

Also if you are using EFI no MBR is used for this … as it uses a small ESP fat32 formarred partition to get booted…

So… a bit frustrated with this…

I got home, I tried all the crazyness with NeoGRUB, all the options between GRUB root (HD2,1) -1 offsets, grub treating 1 as 0, and linux SDA-1/2/3/ SDB 1/2/3 partitions, I could not figure out the proper combos to get Antergos to boot properly.

I re-bured USB Live ISO using Etcher, choosing EFI options, uEFI again told me notscure EFI boot, so I just booted regularly off that USB, started the installer, and this time it did not force me to install a boot partition, again tried the NeoGRUB crazyness, did not work, so for the hell of it I just used uEFI/BIOS menu and told it to boot directly off that drive, and it worked!!!

Now, I’ve got a LG 34" UHD + Dell 24" - Trying to get both or one to display was very problematic, the 34" would not display at native 3440x1440, always out of range, no driver update options were available, so for now I’m going to call this a fail.

Going to try KDE’s NEO release/distro.

I’ll probably come back to Arch soon, maybe once I learn a bit more about boot menus and figure out the UHD support. For now I feel drained.

Thanks for help.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI

May you want to learn about hdpi… There are some helpful tools to get resolution handled, depending on GPU and desktop environment and on the xserver running…

No KDE Neon was a nightmare, my network kept resetting every few seconds, i’m back to this, and installed finally into win 10 MBR, I found a way to recover win10 with bootup USB so i’m more confident about letting Linux distro modify the MBR.

I got the monitor working at 3440x1440 at 59.97 Hz, i tried to have that and an old 24" dell running at the same time, but it’s proving difficult. The 34" inch has problems getting into 3440x1440 with the 24" set to 1920x1080, so I’ve just decided to use the 34" since without the additional, it works pretty well.

Tnx for support.