[arch-general] Win 10 Dual boot nightmare

[Zachary Kline]

Hi All,

I’ve been a Linux user off and on for ten years or so, and over the past while really come to enjoy the simplicity of Arch. I decided to install  on my new HP laptop which came pre-installed with Windows 10.

I honestly almost feel like I preferred the BIOS/boot sector situation. I understand the advantages of EFI in theory, but Win 10 is driving me nuts with its refusal to be a good EFI citizen. Compounding the frustration is the fact that I’m totally blind, and thus my ability to interact with EFI is limited.
I’ve tried the wiki-recommended approach of using BCDEdit to set the {fwbootmgr} DEFAULT entry to the Linux boot manager, in my case systemd-boot. As far as I can tell it does absolutely nothing, that is, Windows still boots after a computer restart.

The only way I’ve managed to boot Linux is to change BootNext, or as BCDEdit calls it, BootSequence. This works for a one-time boot but is fairly tedious.

The alternative wiki approach of changing the path of {bootmgr}, doesn’t seem to do anything either. Windows still boots as it always has. I note that {fwbootmgr} and {bootmgr} seem to be different. I’ve considered changing the path of {fwbootmgr} instead, but ben reluctant for fear of locking myself out of Windows.

Any advice would be appreciated. If this were a BIOS system I would have no trouble with Grub.
Thanks much,
Zack.