1 yr. ago • 83%

I want to dual boot W11 with Arch on my Raid 0 setup

Hello, I have recently built an AM5 pc and loaded Windows 11 onto it. I have two M.2 SSDs setup with RAID 0, through the UEFI.

I want to install dual boot a Linux distro to try and play games on it, because I prefer Linux to Windows.

From where I am with W11 and RAID 0 setup, how can I dual boot Arch, for example?

Should I (can I) partition my RAID0 drive?

12 comments

Dual booting to a single drive(or an array) is a recipe for disaster. You'd be much better off putting each OS on it's own separate drive, and setting arch as the boot distro since grub will allow you to switch to windows if need be. Windows has a tendency to screw with boot partitions so it's more trouble than it's worth to install it "alongside" on a single drive/raided drives.

RAID0 on nvme barely does anything anyways(especially for gaming,) if anything it's worse as it makes some of the lower que depth operations(and latency) slower.

So to your question, you can in theory, but ideally you shouldn't.

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- I actually benchmarked my Samsung 980 Pro M.2 Raid 0 setup vs a single. While sequential read-write is between 2-3* better, random is exactly the same except for 1.8* better random write speed.
  
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  Which is why you generally don't want NVME raid. You'll never, ever use that much sequential in a consumer environment, and game loading mostly uses random reads rather than sequential. What makes an OS feel snappy and responsive is the lower que depths(i.e q1t1,) which actually get worse or stay about the same when you raid flash together.
  
  The only time i feel like raiding them together is worth it is if you're lazy and want one big storage blob, or if you have unique circumstances that demand ridiculous amounts of ingest speed, like with 4k footage.
  
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- This. 👆
  
  I'm committed right now to a Win 10 AME and EndeavourOS Dual Boot, and back when I first started running such a setup, Windows (8, 8.1, 10) would always overwrite the boot sector with it's own loader when installed. You can get a dual boot from grub working by deliberately partitioning before installing Windows, then whichever Linux, making sure to install grub during. I gave up on that hassle after one round and now I just use separate drives for each OS.
  
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I used to dualboot windows and Void/Gentoo 2 years back. Windows screwed up something every now and then

So i got fed up with it and bought a new ssd and life has been so much easier.

Right now ssd prices are very low it seems. So if you can afford it - buying one is a no-brainer.

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Maybe you should have asked that in a regular Linux community. Not really game related.

I would, in general, not recommend to modify any existing operating systems. Better get yourself a small SSD exclusively for Linux. Much less risk of damaging anything.

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- I agree with this sentiment. Dual boot on a single drive (or raid0 in this case) can be done but Windows has a tendency to rewrite the boot partition which makes you unable to boot into Linux. I'm sure there are workarounds, but having them seperate is just much easier.
  
  If you install Linux in it's entirety to a seperate SSD, you select to boot by default into that SSD which should give you the option to boot Windows instead. The other way round is more difficult and tends to break by reasons mentioned above.
  
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The general steps to do this are:

shrink your W11 partition and leave enough room for a Linux install plus games

Boot a LiveCD to check if everything works and you can view your Raid Array

Install Linux distro in new free space
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Do not use RAID... anything for an OS that is not designed for it*. Especially not RAID 0 (which barely deserves to be called "RAID") where you are mostly just increasing the odds of a failure taking out all of your data. A good rule of thumb is to have a smaller drive/partition for the OS and then put the vast majority of storage on a separate drive/partition. That way, if the OS fails it is a fast recovery with minimal data loss.

Things may have changed over the years (the last time I tried was four or five years ago?) but I strongly discourage from any form of dual booting. Windows has a tendency to find ways to completely destroy the bootloader with the most random of updates and then you are stuck having to fix grub and the like. I THINK you can get away with putting each on their own partition, but I am a big fan of one OS per drive and just mashing del as you boot up to pick which drive or doing shenanigans with telling the bios what to boot into on the next reboot while still in linux/windows.

(time to piss some folk off!) Honestly? If you are asking these questions, I suggest not going with Arch. It is a really good distro, but it expects a lot more knowledge of linux from users. People around here hate debian/ubuntu with a passion, but do keep an eye out for some more newbie friendly distros to get your feet wet and learn what YOU care about and want from your distro. Bare minimum, consider Manjaro since that tries to put a more user friendly layer over Arch (and kind of succeeds?)

*: And, somewhat controversially, I would argue that any OS that is actually designed around running across multiple drives (beyond "I guess that could work? Maybe?") is probably not the best choice because.. there is pretty much zero reason to ever do this. Storage should definitely be distributed (and redundant). OSes are disposable and any good OS has a way to rapidly recover in the event of a failure or a corruption.
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- I'm a software engineer, and I know my way around Bash have some familiarity with Linux- mostly Debian. My understanding of how very low leveled stuff happens on my computer is very incomplete though, hence why I ask for help.
  
  If you recommend something that's not Arch, I'm happy to try it, though.
  
  1
  
  Typing commands into a terminal and administrating a system are very different beasts. Arch gets a bit of a bad rep, but it very much still considers a desktop to be a "linux system" rather than "a computer". Ubuntu and Mint tend to be pretty far on the other side of the spectrum as they do their best to make things seamless to the user and put the vast majority of (pertinent) config settings in GUIs and the like.
  
  On its own? Looking up what to run and how to fix problems is not the end of the world. But a lot of the greybeards out there will insist on ONLY answering the specific question asked and nothing related. So you either need to end up cross referencing and researching twelve different aspects of an answer that MAYBE is correct, or you are bowing and asking for help so that said greybeard will paste the rest of the answer they held off on to feel good about themselves. ChatGPT goes a LONG way toward avoiding this, but you still have the "so... is this even correct?" problem that you only really learn from experience and "thinking like a linux distro"
  
  I already suggested Manjaro if you really like Arch but want something more user oriented. But your best bet is to just go browse "linux getting started" on youtube and watch a few videos on the install and configuration process for various distros. You'll obviously find people who insist you need to be doing manual systemd calls and doing sudo emacs for every config file in Ubuntu, but this should give you a good idea of what the "philosophy" of each distro is. Which then lets you figure out which one(s) you want to try.
  
  Personally? All servers should be Debian or some form of RHEL. As a desktop, I used to use Mint but went back to Ubuntu a year or two back. I don't want to be a sysadmin when all I want to do is play some games or watch some media and most of my work is on servers or involves manually building out dependencies anyway. But everyone is different and that is the beauty of linux. Hell, you can even be a complete psychopath and insist on using BSD instead (not sure how that works with Steam though).
  
  And if you set up your partitions (or just drives) correctly, changing distros is a 20 minute process with zero data loss. I mean, I am increasingly looking at alternatives because the Ubuntu snap obsession is increasingly pissing me off. Not a huge deal, but also... changing distros is not a huge deal.
  
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I'm not sure if having a raid is related in this situation, but if you have two drives on the machine and one already has windows then all you needed to is boot into a distro live session and install it on the empty drive. That's all. Also, I wouldn't start with Arch Linux. Try something more user friendly to install if you're new to Linux.

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I found this to be more or less impossible on my AM4 platform. The AMD RAID kernel module didn’t work under any distro. Fire up an Ubuntu live environment and see if you can detect and read the contents of your Windows environment. That should give you a good sense for what is possible. Otherwise I recommend installing to a separate NVME as I have.

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If you do decide to go with a dual boot, I highly recommend rEFInd.

Just gives you a slightly prettier OS selection bootloader.

https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

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