Dual Booting Windows 11

So as one of my first blog posts, I wanted to share my experience setting up a dual boot with Windows 11 and Arch Linux. In theory, this shouldn’t be that hard, and because they were on separate drives my risk of data loss was low.

The first thing I attempted to do was to install the Windows 11 ISO and create a bootable USB drive using dd. Not particularly to my surprise, this didn’t work as Windows 11 requires some extra drivers to be installed that I did not have on the drive since I did not use the Windows Media Creation Tool. Unfortunately that tool is only available on Windows, so I had to use a tool called woeusb-ng to create the bootable USB drive. I debated just trying to run the Windows Media Creation Tool via Wine, but that seemed like a bad idea as it’s directly accessing external hardware.

Anyway, I created the bootable USB drive and booted into it, but to install it on a separate drive, I needed to make sure that it was the right drive. Me being inexperienced with Windows command line, I had to look up the equivalent of lsblk to find the drive I wanted to install Windows on. I ended up using diskpart and the list disk command to find the drive I wanted to install Windows on.

After that, the installation went smoothly, and I was able to boot into Windows 11 with secure boot enabled. I consider this to be close enough of a dual boot setup, as I can boot into either Windows or Arch Linux from my BIOS, having to toggle secure boot on and off as needed.

All was well and I was able to play Battlefield 6, but when time came to boot into Arch Linux, I was greeted with an abnormal and painfully long boot time. It would plop me into some terminal where I could type, but nothing would actually happen. It was like limbo between my bootloader and my init system. It took a while to actually figure out what was going on, since there were no boot logs being logged in where I would expect on my linux system. I ended up using journalctl -b to view the boot logs, saw this large time gap between when grub loaded my init system and when it actually started booting.

I had to remove the quiet options from my grub config to see what was actually going on. Turns out my USB ports were failing to initialize properly. They would try to restart, and for each USB port that failed to initialize, it would take about 15 seconds. This only started happening after I installed Windows 11. You can actually see the logs of your usb ports initializing by running dmesg | grep usb.

After unplugging and reconnecting my USB devices, I was able to boot into Arch Linux without any unnecessary delay. I also went back into windows and turned off fast startup, which I hear can cause issues with dual booting.

All in all, it was a weird process with some unexpected issues, but it seems to be working well enough now, until it didn’t, but that’s a story for another time. Next up is signing my bootloader so that I can boot into Arch Linux without having to disable secure boot.