[arch-general] Win10 Upgrade makes ArchLinux inaccessible?

[Murari]

On 29 April 2016 at 00:09, Zachary Kline <zkline at speedpost.net> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> So my laptop upgraded to the latest version of Windows 10 recently, and
> this seems to have undone the hack of replacing the default bootx64.efi
> file. That is, the file is still  SystemD’s boot loader, but somehow I’m
> back to only being able to boot Windows reliably. Has anyone else seen this
> particular frustration with an upgrade? I note that my laptop came with
> Windows 10, so this was just an incremental update as far as I now.
>
> Thanks for any ideas. This is kind of maddening.
> Best,
> Zack.



Hi,

I haven't updated Windows 10 in quite a while so I haven't experienced
this, but have you checked to see if both the locations to which you copied
the systemd-bootx64.efi are still OK? On my (HP) laptop, I have systemd's
boot loader copied to both $ESP$/EFI/Boot/BOOTX64.efi and
$ESP$/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgr.efi. Windows 10 does make changes to
critical files through regular updates, but these are the only two files
that should mess with the boot process.

A more awkward (but more stable) hack would be to create an ESP on a USB
stick and install rEFInd or grub to that partition. Systemd-boot can only
load applications located on the partition it is currently on, but rEFInd
and grub both support booting across devices (in principle). My laptop's
BIOS Setup allows me to prioritise USB sticks over internal hard drives at
boot time so this should be a reliable way to multi-boot, though I haven't
had the time to test it.

-- 
Murari