Dual Boot Windows 11 and Alpine Linux – Part 2

The next step in setting up dual boot is to copy the bootable USB created in part 1 onto the simple volume created.

Prerequisites

• Bootable USB w/Alpine Linux installed and setup
• Partition formatted as a Simple Volume

This far into the setup, the number of articles and documents I used was less than 5. On the primary Dualbooting wiki page, there is a short guide on mounting and copying the boot system from the USB to the partition but there are a few other pages I referenced.

1. Plug in the USB to the computer while it is still off, on startup frequently click F9 to enter the boot menu. Select the USB, this will start up the Alpine system.
2. Open the terminal, use “lsblk” to find the correct device, it should be whatever it was named when creating the simple volume.
3. Follow the steps in the Format and mount the HDD partition section
   • Install e2fsprogs, run “apk add e2fsprogs”
   • format the partition to be ext4 “mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdXY”
   • (optional) keep the e2fsprogs tool installed so that the USB can be reused with another partition
   • skip the basic setup section
4. Copy the system to the mounted parition, run “setup-disk -m sys /mnt”

The last step is to upgrade the grub installation, but since the dual boot is with Windows 11 there is no grub installation. Luckily, there are only a few extra steps to go through as a workaround.

1. Update the GRUB configuration file
   • mount all paths https://phoenixnap.com/kb/grub-rescue
   • mount EFI drive at “/mnt/boot/EFI” https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/679800
2. Run “apk add efibootmgr”
3. Run “grub-install –root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/”
4. After the grub re-installation, unmount all paths from step 1
5. Save the current configuration and shutdown the computer

Verify the Install

While the machine is still off unplug the USB, at this point it should not be needed. Now, restart the machine and enter the boot menu (again). Select the Alpine OS from the menu and let the system boot. The desktop environment should start up, unfortunately I have not yet figured out how to resize the login window, but using the root account to sign in should allow the desktop display more reasonable fonts and icon sizes.

As long as secure boot is not re-enabled the machine should boot from Alpine Linux, to switch back to Windows use the boot menu and select the OS.

I plan to shrink the Windows partition to about 128Gi and add the remaining storage to the Linux partition on my own machine. I have already installed Tailscale and plan to connect remotely to the “Linux device” with Putty or another tool.

I initially intended to have this second part published mid-January, for that sorry for the late update. I heard that this setup is easier on a Linux machine, so I might try this again with a Ubuntu instead of Windows.