I’m currently using a PC which has Windows 10 and Fedora 35 in dual boot. The two OSes are in completely separate physical drives. I want to wipe the slate clean for the Fedora drive so I can dual boot Arch, however due to me being clumsy and more of a “read the manual” guy I’m not sure what the correct steps are to safely wipe Fedora without breaking anything else. I assume it’s Fedora booting first (as the Windows blue OS choice screen is replaced by a mobo firmware-like window).
So what do I do? Is it as simple as wiping the drive and changing boot device to Windows or does it require more steps?
With a fedora installer is as simple as booting the installer, selecting the drive to install to and telling it to use the whole disk. I am not an expert on an arch installation, but if you choose to not rely on the arch installer then boot to the fedora live USB, use fdisk (or gdisk or parted) and wipe out the partition table on the disk you want to install to. Then when you are ready to install arch it has an empty disk to install to.
Wouldn’t I be able to just wipe the drive (no formatting) from Win10 and then, since most likely the motherboard will still boot to the now empty drive, just change boot device to the one hosting Win10?
I am not sure. I seem to recall that mostly windows does not even see a drive that has linux installed on it. I am sure of the suggestions I made but maybe windows can be used. What you would want to do is erase the partition table without creating a new one and leave the disk unallocated, and it is likely that windows will refuse to do it that way.
In any case, if you are booting with UEFI and both windows and fedora were installed that way the grub boot menu will still show up until you wipe out the fedora installation. I think that resetting the bios to first boot from the windows install will eliminate the grub boot menu, but have not recently done so and am not certain.
You can boot into Windows recovery and select repair system which will fix the boot only into Windows. Then you can do whatever you want with the other drive as Windows will not even see it.
Hello @gyarik ,
Welcome to discussion area. Sure you can blow away whatever is on the drive you want to install Arch on. I would just install Arch on it and not bother to erase what’s there just reformat during install. Since you are already selecting the boot option from the BIOS Boot Menu, you will still be able to boot Windows 10.
discussion area. Sure you can blow away whatever is on the drive you want to install Arch on. I would just install Arch on it and not bother to erase what’s there just reformat during install. Since you are already selecting the boot option from the BIOS Boot Menu, you will still be able to boot Windows 10.