dual boot win7/linux

stylers

just wondering if this is a win 7 specific feature or did it also happen with vista ? -
basically I have installed the win 7 rc over my XP partition which I was dual booting with linux, which worked fine. after win 7 had naturally enough clobbered the MBR and killed grub, I reinstalled grub to a separate partition and set this partition to boot.
This works fine, but it seems the win 7 bootloader checks to see if its own partition has the boot flag set, and if not, it sets it back anyway, so on next reboot grub is gone AWOL again, and boots straight to 7. I can reset the boot flag back to the grub boot partition with parted, and this is fine until I boot 7 again. kind of annoying when I'd like to be able to test win 7 for a bit.

not much info on dual booting 7, so has anyone else had this prob, or have I messed up ?. maybe there is a way to disable this boot flag check in win 7 ?

BopNiblets

Mine dual boots fine with Mint 7 and Windows 7 (RC), didn't have any problems as you describe.

marcphisto

I am also dual booting Mint 7 and Windows 7 RC. My guess is that it's the sequence of installation that might have confused things on you. (i.e. installing windows after linux).

Is there anything in your boot options in msconfig I wonder?

stylers

well it was a backwards dual boot installation, as in it was working grand with XP and ubuntu, but installing 7 mashed the grub, and for some reason grub wouldn't install itself to the original partition. So, there was a bit of a gap left which i formatted as ext3, and grub installed fine to that. set the boot flag on it and grub was away again. but after boting 7, it sets the boot flag back to the NTFS partition, so it looks like it checks for it..
didnt check msconfig though - will try that, and I might try vista boot pro and see if it can add the grub partition to the 7 bootloader - BCDedit looks tricky to use..

marco_polo

Had a similar issue when I reinstalled Vista as 64 bit to replace of 32, This should work with Win 7 too, I am guessing that like all previous versions of windows, Win 7 does not play nice with grub.

One way to reinstall grub is as follows:

1. Boot from Live CD.
2. Open a terminal window.
3. Type "grub"
4. Then type "root (hd0,1)", (with appropriate hd and partition mumbers for your disk)
5. Type "setup (hd0)".
6. Then type "quit".
7. Finally Reboot and grub should display on startup.

Or are you saying that you have done something like this and that windows 7 goes and undoes it again anyway. In that case I am stumped.

noshankus

While I know you didn't ask, as I don't know your memory available/needs and/or which system you prefer to use primarily and/or your preferences(phew!), what I have done for the last few years is to use virtualisation.

I currently use Kubuntu 9.04 as my main OS and inside that I run both WindowsXP Pro (Windows 7 is supported too) and two Solaris machines. This is great for me as I only really use winbloze for Visio and a couple of windows only applications.

In the past I have happily ran windows inside a VM on Kubuntu with 1GB RAM, suspending windows and waking it up when I need it as it uses your RAM. Of course, you could always go the opposite way and install windows and have linux in a VM. Virtualbox is great for this and I believe VMware has a free version too.

It also saves a bunch of time between rebooting! The more RAM you have, the more appealing and better this option becomes.

stylers

to marco_polo, yes thats what i did to get grub going again, and 7 undoes it by setting the boot flag back to its own partition, which causes the box to boot straight to 7 again.. setting the boot flag back gets grub going again, but its a PITA. this old P4 box runs ubuntu well, but I'd be stretching it a bit with a VM. incidentally, 7 actually runs quite unbelievably well on it too, so maybe it is time for a hats off to M$ :eek:
ah anyway I'll figure it out yet

cheers.

marco_polo

Jeez thats a head wrecker, it seems that it should as easy to setup a dual boot as with any other version of Windows from what I have read(except for your setup for some bizzare reason). Perhaps accept honourable defeat and edit the 7 bootloader to put a Linux option in there? (Please don't ask me how )

Good luck with it anyway.

slowlydownwards

hmm... are you sure you reinstalled grub to MBR? (and not just to its own partition).

Sherifu

stylers wrote: »

to marco_polo, yes thats what i did to get grub going again, and 7 undoes it by setting the boot flag back to its own partition, which causes the box to boot straight to 7 again.. setting the boot flag back gets grub going again, but its a PITA. this old P4 box runs ubuntu well, but I'd be stretching it a bit with a VM. incidentally, 7 actually runs quite unbelievably well on it too, so maybe it is time for a hats off to M$ :eek:
ah anyway I'll figure it out yet

cheers.

Had no such trouble with grub and windows 7 beta or RC. Strange indeed.

I'd guess something along the lines of what slowlydownwards said above may be that answer.