You NEED to Try This Linux + Windows Dual Boot (Omarchy)

If you're wanting to run Linux as your daily driver in 2026 without having to give up Windows completely, this is the cleanest dual boot setup I found. And I'll show you today how to build it step by step. In this video, we're setting up a desktop PC to dual boot Windows and Linux, specifically Omari, with a shared drive between them so you can edit videos, pass files, and switch operating systems without the usual mess. And I've actually wiped my entire computer to walk you through it. So, Linux is my main environment, but I still need Windows occasionally for tools like Da Vinci Resolve and a few PCON apps. Instead of compromising, I built a setup that gives me both cleanly. By the end of this video, you'll have the exact same layout, separate operating systems, a shared NTFS drive, and a dual boot system that actually makes sense. So, if you've wanted to run Linux, but weren't ready to fully ditch Windows, go and grab any desktop, mini PC, or old laptop, and let's build this thing together. And here's the plan. So, I recently pieced together a used desktop PC. My first desktop in like 20 years. Seriously, I may have to do a separate video on the why and what and that whole process. But here was the plan with this heading into 2026. There are two NVME drives in my computer. One is a 1 TBTE NVME. I'll be installing Windows on this. The other is a two TBTE NVME. I'm installing Omari on 500 GB of this and we'll leave the other 1.5 TB as a shared NTFS drive between the two. And this means we'll have to do a manual Omari installation in order to install it on a partition, but it's actually not that bad. Let's begin with Windows, which we'll move fast through as most people can already handle this part. And if you need to skip around, there will be timestamps below. And if you get stuck along the way, leave a comment or feel free to jump into the Travis Media community and we can talk about it there. link below. Oh, and quick disclaimer. I used this capture card to capture the installations, BIOS, prompts, and all that from the source computer, and the quality didn't turn out that great, so bear with me. So, let's create a Windows boot disc and install that to start. Insert a USB drive that's at least 8 GB. Search for Windows 11 ISO Mac because I'm on a Mac doing this. Scroll down and under download Windows 11 disc image ISO for x64 devices, choose the Windows 11 multi-edition. Click confirm. Select your language and confirm and choose 64-bit download to download the Windows ISO. Now open up dis utility. Choose your USB disc and erase. The name I'll put is Windows 11. Format is MS DOS fat and for scheme we'll leave as GID partition map and go ahead and erase your USB. Once that's done, we want to download an application called Windisk Writer. So Google that, click on the GitHub page, choose Windis Writer under releases, and download the zip. And once that's done, open the zip and drag the application file into the applications folder. and then open it up. Now, because this is an unsigned application, you'll need to go to settings, privacy and security, and scroll down and choose open anyway to open it up. Finally, select that downloaded Windows ISO file for your Windows image. Your target device should be the USB stick. Make sure you have FAT32 selected as your file system and start. Once that's done, eject the USB and put it in a USB port of the computer you want to install Windows on and boot it up to install. Now, the only thing I want to note on the install is one, I got my PC build used and there was a Windows product key already activated on my hardware, so I can choose I don't have a product key and it will activate fine. But you may need to enter your key here if you do not. And then second, be sure you choose the right drive to install Windows on. For me, it's the disk one 1 gigabyte drive. So, proceed with the install and eventually after declining all the adwear and denying your data being sent to Microsoft, you'll have a working Windows install. So, go ahead, shut it down and let's move on to installing a partitioned Omari. So, Omari on easy install wants your entire disc. And the only way to partition this is to do a manual install. Thankfully, Omari has great docs on how to do this, but leaves out some critical information, which I'll cover here. I've also laid this out in a blog post over at Travis. Media, link to that below. First, the boot disc we need to create is not Omarie, but the Arch Linux ISO. We install Arch Linux and then install Omarie on it. So, go to omaree.org, choose manual, and scroll down to the manual installation guide. Click on download the Arch Linux ISO. Select this link under the HTTP direct downloads section to check out the mirror sites. And I'll just choose the first one after worldwide. And be sure to download the Arch Linux x8664 ISO file. After that's done, download or open up Balin Etcher or if you're on Windows, Rufus. We'll select flash from file and select the Arch Linux ISO that you downloaded. Select your target, which is the USB stick that you're going to install this on. and then flash. And when that's done, you'll have your Arch Linux USB boot drive. Plug this into the USB port on the device you also installed Windows on. And let's get Omari set up. Let's boot up our computer. And when you see this screen, hit F2 to enter the BIOS. And this could possibly be F7 or delete on your computer. And here we're going to do two things. First, we need to disable secure boot. And that will be found under the boot menu. So I'll go to advanced boot expand secure boot and I'll change it to other OS. Windows UEFI mode is secure. Other OS is not. We want other OS or secure boot disabled. Second, set your first boot option to your USB disc so that it will boot from that. Omari will change this back after it gets installed. Save your changes and exit. When it boots, choose the Arch Linux install medium, and eventually you'll get to this command prompt. Now, following the Omari manual install instructions, let's first connect to Wi-Fi by running IWCTL, which is a tool for configuring wireless internet. And this command starts an interactive session. Next, type stationw scan. Then, stationw connect and the name of your Wi-Fi network. You'll be prompted for the passphrase of that network to connect and then type exit to exit this interactive session. Next, you'll run Arch install all one word to begin the installation of Arch Linux. And that will bring us to these configuration settings. Here you want to set each setting as detailed in this manual installation guide. Be sure to do them all. That's straightforward. The tricky part is the disconfiguration because this guide doesn't tell you how to partition. So, let me walk you through it. Choose disc configuration partitioning and use a best effort default partition layout. Select the disc you want to install Omari on. Not the USB disc, not the disc we installed Windows on, but the other. For me, this is the two TBTE NVMe drive. File system is BTRFS, which stands for Btree file system. In this note about using default sub volumes, choose yes. Use compression, yes. and you end up with this config. So the plan here is to create a boot disc then the rest for Omari. This large drive is compressed and has sub volumes but we want to partition this further. Well why then did we choose best effort layout? Well we chose it to have it create this boot disc for us. That's all. We now are going to partition this large disc. So choose partitioning again and this time choose manual partitioning. Select your disc. not the USB, not the Windows, but the one for Linux. Now select the larger partition, not the boot, and choose delete partition. It should now show with a status of free. Now we want to create a partition from it. So choose the large disc, and I'm going to partition an aotment of 512gib for my Omari install. So type 512 GIB lowercase I and that should be btrfs. And now you see that on this install we will create a boot drive, create a 512GB drive which we'll install Omari on and the rest will be free for us to make into an NTFS drive to share between our Windows and Linux installs later. Now a couple more important things to do here for our Omari drive. Select it and choose mark as compressed. You should see compress equals ZSTD under the mount options. Now select it again and now we need to add back those default subv volumes that we removed when we deleted the partition. So choose set subv volumes and let's do this one by one. First we'll do a name of at with a mount point of forward slash. Choose add subvol to add another and this will have a name of at home with a mount point of forward slhome. The next one is at log mountpoint of forward slashvar/log. And then the final one is at package and that's at /var cache pacmanpkg. And I have all these listed on my blog post if you need to copy and paste. Link to that below. But after all four of these are added, choose confirm and exit. And you should have a final disc configuration screen that looks like this. We have our boot partition and we have our 512GIB BTRFS partition that is compressed and has these four subv volumes. The rest of the disc will remain free. At this point again be sure to hit all the options listed in the manual installation Omari docs. This includes disk encryption which is required and actually let's just do that now. Choose disk encryption. Encryption type needs to be set to LUKS which is the standard for Linux full disk encryption. set an encryption password and then for partitions, be sure you are encrypting your Omari partition, which in this case is my 512GB. Now go back and hit all the other options. When you're done, scroll down to install to install Arch Linux. And when that's finished, choose reboot system. On reboot, choose Arch Linux. And you'll need your password to access the root volume. Then you'll need to log in with the user you created. Note that I set my host name to Omarie. That's why it says that here. We haven't installed it yet. It's just the host name that I chose. So, go ahead and log in. And finally, as in the manual install docs, we run the curl command to install Omari. Enter your password for pseudo and it will install Omari for you. And when it's done, you'll reboot into a fresh install of Omari. Now, side note, I have a lot of errors up here at the top. At the time of this install, Hyperland just released a new update before Omari could react and broke a few things. There was already a GitHub issue out there around it which advised at the moment to downgrade, which I did. And all is well until they get an update pushed. If you're following this tutorial, it's probably already fixed and you'll have no issue. If you need to downgrade, here's the way. Now, there are two more things to do here. First, we need to add Windows to our boot screen. So when we boot up our computer, we can easily choose between the two. And then second, we need to create a shared volume between our two operating systems. Adding Windows to our boot screen is easy. Omari uses lemony, which is an advanced bootloader, and we simply need to open a terminal with super and enter, and type pseudo lemon-c li-can, which will detect active boot entries. And we'll choose number one, Windows boot manager to add that to our boot screen. And if you want to take a look at that config just to confirm, just cat the lemonade.com file and you'll see that Windows has been added. So now when we reboot, we can choose from the screen to go the route of Omari, which will default if you don't hit anything, or we can scroll down and choose Windows boot manager to boot Windows instead. Let's go ahead and choose Windows so we can make a free space into a shared NTFS drive between the two. So boot Windows, type in disk management, and create and format hard disk partitions. There you'll write click on the unallocated free space, choose new simple volume. Keep the default full volume size. I'll assign the letter D to be this drive. And I'll change the volume label to be named shared. You can set this to whatever you want, but shared seems like a good name for me. Click finish. And you should now see a D drive called shared. And we're done on Windows. Now reboot your machine. And this time we'll boot into Omari. Open a terminal, which again is super enter. And run lsbk, which stands for list block devices. So quick note here. SDA is our USB drive. We need to pull that out. NVME1 is our Windows drive. and NVMe 0N1 is our Linux drive. But the partition inside of that NVMe 0N1P3 is the free space. And if we run this again with the F flag, we'll see the FS type of NTFS and the label of shared. So this is the name we need, NVMe 01 P3. Let's create a share drive in our mount directory. And let's go ahead and mount this drive on our machine in that directory. And note the /dev before it. And we can confirm this by running an ls on that directory. But we don't want to do that every time. We want this to automount for us on each boot. So to do this, let's get the UU ID or universally unique identifier for this drive. To get that, run BLK ID with the drive and copy this UU ID to the clipboard. Finally, we'll edit the / etsy/fstab file, which stands for file systems table. So, we can add this to it. And look at these others. They should be familiar. They're from our sub volumes that we defined. And our boot partition is here, too. And as a next entry, let's add our UU ID and some spaces in between. And then /mount/shared. And then defaults, no a time. And default includes things like read write. So, we don't need to define those individually. And then finally zero and zero. And then let's change ownership of that mounted drive to my user. You'll want to replace Travis with your user in group. And we're done. But I want this folder to live a little bit closer, maybe in my home user directory. So let's create a sim link to that mount from our user folder. So I want it to live here. And to create this sim link, I'll run ln- s mount shared and then link that to a home shared folder. Now, if I list the files and folders in my home directory, I'll see the shared folder there linked to the mounted drive. Easy access. Now, one final tip, actually a very important tip. Windows will fight Linux for your drive. Long story short, Linux will mount this drive as readon. And to make this work seamlessly between the two, log into Windows, go to control panel, power options, choose what the power buttons do, and disable turn on fast startup. This is important. And that's it. You have a fully functioning Windows OMI machine with a shared drive to pass files between them. If you ran into any issues, let me know below or on my blog post or jump into the Travis Media community and we can work it out. If you found this video helpful, give it a thumbs up. If you haven't subscribed to the channel, consider doing so. and I'll see you in the next video.

If you want to run Linux as your daily driver without giving up Windows, this is the cleanest dual boot setup I recommend going into 2026. In this complete guide, I show you how to dual boot Omarchy and Windows on separate, dual drives, manually partition Omarchy, use a modern bootloader, and create a shared NTFS drive so both systems can access the same files, without the usual mess or risk. This setup is safe, clean, and built the right way from the start. 📖 Blog guide: https://travis.media/blog/install-omarchy-partition-dual-boot-windows/ 💬 Get help or ask questions in the Travis Media Community - https://www.skool.com/travis-media-community 🕒 Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:53 The plan 01:57 Create Windows boot disk 03:40 Install Windows 04:18 Create Arch Linux boot disk 05:36 Disable secure boot 06:16 Arch Linux configuration 07:12 Disk partitioning setup and encryption 10:05 Final configuration 10:57 Install Omarchy 11:12 Hyprland issue fix 11:52 Add Windows to boot screen 12:36 Creating a shared NTFS drive 13:12 Mount NTFS on Omarchy Linux 15:35 Final IMPORTANT Tip 16:00 Outro 📢 Video mentions - Blog post - https://travis.media/blog/install-omarchy-partition-dual-boot-windows/ - Omarchy getting started video - https://youtu.be/F3j_1AEQkHk - My dotfiles - https://github.com/rodgtr1/dotfiles 🎥 Watch These Next 🎥 https://youtu.be/995-SYn6960 https://youtu.be/EMWNZtCYg5s https://youtu.be/LnKoncbQBsM FOLLOW ME ON Twitter - https://x.com/travisdotmedia LinkedIn - https://linkedin.com/in/travisdotmedia FAVORITE TOOLS AND APPS: Udemy deals, updated regularly - https://travis.media/udemy ZeroToMastery - https://geni.us/AbMxjrX Camera - https://amzn.to/3LOUFZV Lens - https://amzn.to/4fyadP0 Microphone - https://amzn.to/3sAwyrH ** My Coding Blueprints ** Learn to Code Web Developer Blueprint - https://geni.us/HoswN2 AWS/Python Blueprint - https://geni.us/yGlFaRe - FREE Both FREE in the Travis Media Community - https://imposterdevs.com FREE EBOOKS 📘 https://travis.media/ebooks #omarchy #dualboot #linux