Which method for dual boot on UEFI system?

Support
1

I have an HP EliteDesk G2 Mini that has Win10 and I wish to dual boot Manjaro on it.
It is UEFI system, with gpt and the Windows EFI partition is /dev/sda2 and about 260M in size.

I am a bit confused because I am reading two different methods:

  1. https://forum.manjaro.org/t/root-tip-dual-boot-manjaro-and-windows/1164
  2. [Manjaro: dual boot with Windows 10 - YouTube]

The second method is very well presented and the main difference I can see is that it does not create a new boot partition like Method 1 does but rather uses the Windows EFI partition, gives it the mount point: “/boot/efi” and gives it a “boot” flag.

The first method creates another /boot/efi partition, which seems to me redundant and asking for trouble.

Any comments appreciated.

2

No the first method is the best.
If you use windows /boot/efi there is a good chance that a windows update will overwrite it and your linux will no longer boot.

3

That first link does look like it wants you to create another efi partition (Section: Manjaro installation), even if you already have one.
If you have Windows 10 installed, then you already have “/boot/efi/EFI” installed.

I didn’t look at the second link, but I make sure I tell Calamares to include “/boot/efi” partition.

4

No - not asking for trouble - you are relieving yourself of possible trouble when Windows hijacks your loader. The article is based on many years of experience - but you are free to ignore the advise - it is not mandatory but a recommendation and you can do exactly what you want.

Just search the present forum for boot problems after Windows update - and when you are not convinced search the archived.forum.manjaro.org - it should contain enough evidence to proof the validity of the advise.

The EFI specification doesn’t state you need to have only one $esp - in fact you can have as many as you need. Only one can be active at a time and it will be marked active when you load the system it points to.

The EFI partition is 500MB but can be as little as 32MB - it is not recommended to make it that small.

5

128MB works well for grub