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Unofficial: Dualboot with Windows

  1. Your EFI Partition needs to be at least 1G.

    For existing installs use: Arch Wiki: Replace the partition with a larger one

    For fresh installs use: Arch Wiki: dictate the size of the EFI system partition during installation

  2. Disable Secure Boot and verify that Windows still boots up.

  3. Lastly, open Disk Management and shrink your Windows NTFS partition.

  1. We won’t use the official installer. Instead, download the AstrOS DDI (system image) from https://dl.astros-linux.org/AstrOS_‘LATEST-VERSION’_x86-64.raw.zst. You can find the latest version number in the CI logs. Otherwise, download and mount the official installer to copy the DDI out of the images partition.

  2. Write the DDI to a USB stick with at least 16 GB of storage and boot it.

  3. Go through the first boot setup and open a terminal.

  4. Use systemd repart to clone AstrOS to your system disk:

    Terminal window
    sudo systemd-repart --dry-run=yes --empty=refuse --defer-partitions=root /dev/drive
    # Confirm that everything is as you want it to be, and then run it again with --dry-run=no.
    sudo systemd-repart --dry-run=no --empty=refuse --defer-partitions=root /dev/drive
  5. Mount the ESP of the partition to which you will install and use rsync to copy /boot to it:

    sudo mkdir /mnt
    sudo mount /dev/sdxY /mnt
    sudo cp -r /boot/. /mnt
  6. Create a boot entry (only required on some hardware).

    efibootmgr --create --disk /dev/sdX --part Y --loader '\EFI\systemd\systemd-bootx64.efi' --label "AstrOS" --unicode
  7. Reboot