Expand Windows Install Article

[gangwerz]

I sent a Customer instructions on how to copy the Windows EFI directory into the Pop!_OS EFI directory so that they could use systemd-boot to select their OS. Additionally, I sent them information on using efibootmgr to select Windows as a 1-time boot option so you can reboot to Windows from within Pop!_OS.

They suggested we add this to the support article, so I am placing my instructions below that can be expanded and adapted

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You can add a Windows entry to the EFI directory used by Pop!_OS, and then Windows will be added to the systemd-boot menu. I currently have this configuration on my system. To set it up, I copied the "Microsoft" folder from the Windows EFI partition to /boot/efi/EFI/Microsoft on Pop!_OS. The steps I followed are below:

1. Have both Windows and Pop!_OS booting on your system. Make sure both load when you select their respective drive from the Firmware boot menu
2. Boot to Pop!_OS
3. Mount the Windows EFI partition
   1. Run lsblk in a Terminal to list partitions on your systems
      • The EFI partition should be the 1st partition on the Windows drive, and will be around 100M in size
   2. Now mount the Windows EFI partition to /mnt
      • sudo mount /dev/NAME where NAME is from the "name" column of the lsblk output for the EFI partition
      • After mounting on a test machine, I ran ls -al /mnt/EFI and I was able to see a "Boot" and a "Microsoft" folder at this point
   3. Now copy the "Microsoft" folder to your Pop!_OS EFI partition.
      • sudo cp -Rv /mnt/EFI/Microsoft /boot/efi/EFI/Microsoft will copy the folder if the Windows EFI was mounted as I indicated above
4. When you reboot at this point, Windows should now show in the systemd-boot menu.

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Since you are dual booting, I also wanted to share how to reboot directly to Windows from Pop!_OS.

1. Run the efibootmgr command in a Terminal.
   • This will show you the available EFI boot entries found on your system
2. Find the "Microsoft Boot Manager" line, we will need the 4-digit number found in the Boot000x section
3. Run the below command to set a 1-time boot to the Windows partition.
   • The 1-time boot selection will be loaded the next time you boot or reboot the system. After that, the default boot item will be used like normal
   • sudo efibootmgr -n 000x replace the x at the end with the number found in the "Microsoft Boot Manager" line.
4. Now, reboot your system and Windows will boot. If you reboot Windows, it will go back to Pop!_OS. If you were to reboot Pop!_OS once more, it will continue to load Pop!_OS unless you intervene.

[archer46]

No mention is made of driver installation. https://github.com/system76/windows-drivers should be mentioned in some form.