Fifteen: Dual Boot Hiccup

This post will be short, but I wanted to ensure that I write the issue and solution down, because the likelihood that I run into it again is extremely high. Without further ado:

The issue: Windows Update

I did not think twice about updating my Windows system post-dualboot. However, when I updated, it took a comically long amount of time. At that point, I knew it was messing with my dualboot. When I tried to boot into Arch, I got a message along the lines of:

Could not find \vmlinuz-linux.

At that point, my system restarted – right into Windows. Oh boy. To be honest, I didn’t actually know what that file was. I figured out from searching online that it was my kernel. Great! Windows Update just removed my kernel.

The solution

The solution, of course, is to boot up system rescue and chroot. I figured out that my kernel was actually somehow corrupted but still there.So, my solution ended up being (after searching for a while and trying random stuff) to exit into systemrescue again, unmount my drives, fsck my boot partition (which found errors that it then corrected), remount my partitions, arch-chroot into my system, pacman -Suy linux, and then it did some linux magic (I think: mkinitcpio -p linux). Finally, I rebooted and I got into my arch system. Crisis averted.

My next step is to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. I looked online and I believe that installing rEFInd is the solution. More word on that once I mess it up in the near future.