Is there a way to manually try and boot my HD arch install from the install USB? I wanted to try that using the 'Boot existing OS' option, but am wondering if it fails since only /dev/sda1 features a bootable flag and it's encrypted so only the HP BIOS can handle it? I thought about making /dev/sda3 bootable, but from my reading I can only have one bootable flag on a Windows system. It's quite difficult to troubleshoot as I don't know if this is an installation issue or an EasyBCD one. I've simplified to just primary partitions (as shown above) to troubleshoot. I tried /boot as primary and Arch/TC as logicals, as well as a primary TC partition with boot/root as a logical drive combination. I originally had a couple variations on logical/extended partitions since I need my eventual setup to hold a shared TrueCrypt partition so I can access my work files from both Win7 and arch. I'm really struggling to understand what I'm doing wrong.

Selecting 'Boot existing OS' from the Arch install USB doesn't give me any options at all.įrom what I can tell, I'm using the same procedure that I ended up with on this former troubleshooting exercise. Any key press takes me to some sort of BIOS boot thingy which tells me to 'Please install an operating system!' I think this is something built into the laptop BIOS, not anything from the syslinux side. I reboot, get the EasyBCD menu, but then the lone words 'Boot error' on a black screen.

Using EasyBCD, I added a entry for a syslinux bootloader, pointing it to 'Partition 3 (Linux - 128MiB).' iso (downloaded Friday 5/29)Īt this point, exited the arch-chroot, unmounted/closed my partitions, and rebooted into Win7. booted from USB drive of the Arch installation. created two unformatted partitions with no drive letter using Minitool Partition Wizard, setting the partition ID to 0x83 for both shrunk C: down from the Win7 built-in partition utility My process for creating the partitions is as follows: dev/sda4: /, encrypted Arch root, cryptsetup/ext4 (created) With that out of the way, here's the process I used:

Just wanted to add that, as almost all issues involving dual boot inevitably bring about the suggestion to 'just chainload windows from grub/syslinux/etc.' the other way around! The computer drive is encrypted with McAfee Endpoint Encryption, and doing anything whatsoever with the MBR from outside of Windows will brick my computer. Just a note up front from scouring the internet for ideas: I cannot use syslinux (or any other bootloader) to chainload Win7 vs. I got a new work computer and am trying to recreate my formerly successful setup, which I documented here some time ago. The Arch install is sound, it's getting win7/EasyBCD to load it that's the issue. Narrowed down the issue to something unrelated to Arch, and felt this was more accurate. EDIT: title was 'Dual boot with Win7, easybcd + syslinux, getting 'Boot error''.

Easybcd bootable