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classy-giraffe / easy-arch

Script for boostrapping Arch Linux with BTRFS, snapshots and LUKS encryption (UEFI only).
https://classy-giraffe.github.io/easy-arch
Apache License 2.0
226 stars 49 forks source link

Request: Dual Boot #58

Open erenoglu opened 9 months ago

erenoglu commented 9 months ago

Describe the bug Script forces to erase all partition layout on disk, even if there's sufficient unused space on partition table, in a scenario where existing Windows would like to be kept intact for dual boot

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

  1. On your Windows PC, shrink the Windows Data partition and make available a large free space in partition table
  2. Download Arch Iso and boot with it.
  3. Use the easy-arch script, at least step, it will ask you to confirm deleting all your partitions

Expected behavior Present dialog that new partitions will be created for boot and encrypted root, use default size for boot ie 2gb and allocate rest of free space to root.

classy-giraffe commented 9 months ago

This is WIP. The issue with dual boot is that there's no standard way to achieve that (you could have a multi-disk setup with a single EFI partition, a multi-disk setup with 2 EFI partitions, a single disk setup which requires shrinking an NTFS partition offline, which is quite complicated). I'd really like to come up with something that cover dual boot setups though.

erenoglu commented 9 months ago

yes it can be endless. My recommendation would be to start with simplest case which shall cover 95% of the setups, ie single disk, Windows installed by default in factory, user pre-shrinked Windows and created empty space. So, you have EFI partition already to host ReFind or Grub, then create a 1GB boot partition (if required for easy encryption), and then create another partition for the rest of the system.