[ale] Dual Boot Windows 7 & Fedora 15

[Ron Frazier]

Brandon,

I know this message is a bit old, but, did you solve your problem?  What 
is the make and model of your laptop?  I am dual booting Windows and 
Ubuntu with the following partition structure.  I'm using the MBR style 
of boot sector.  I have 4 primary partitions.  Partition 1 is a hidden 
recovery partition which came with the system.  Partition 2 was the 
original C drive.  I defragged that then shrunk it with the Windows disk 
management tool and created a partition 3 and partition 4.  I formatted 
partitions 3 and 4 originally with NTFS just to make sure they were 
initialized and to force the drive to check for bad sectors.  I also 
left 2 GB unallocated at the end of the drive.  This allows me to clone 
the drive to another 500 GB drive for backup without encountering sizing 
problems if the destination drive has slightly different size.  If you 
don't have or need a hidden partition, you could use one as a Linux swap 
partition, but I use a swap file instead.  I assigned a volume label 
similar to Windows Asus01 to partition 2 and Data Asus01 to partition 
4.  The data partition is still NTFS, but is shared by Windows and 
Linux.  Either one can write to it.  I like to dismount the NTFS 
partition in Linux after writing to it.  Then, I installed Ubuntu on 
partition 3.  During installation, I chose manual partitioning options 
and formatted partition 3 as EXT4 and told Ubuntu to install itself 
there.  I also went into an advanced option in the setup screens and 
told it to put Grub on partition 3 as well.  I prefer to use the Windows 
boot loader as my primary.  So, the problem is to get the Windows boot 
loader to chain over to grub.  You can use a Windows program called Easy 
BCD.  This lets you customize the Windows boot menu and add Ubuntu to 
it.  So, when I boot, the Windows boot loader gives me a menu which has 
options for Windows and Ubuntu.  When I select Ubuntu, then grub 
appears.  From grub, I can boot Ubuntu as normal.  If you want grub as 
your primary boot loader, you can install Linux after Windows and put 
grub on the windows partition, as I understand it.  I haven't tried that 
though.  You should then be able to start Windows from grub.  If you 
have any questions about my setup, I'd be glad to elaborate.

Sincerely,

Ron

On 7/26/2011 2:29 PM, Brandon Antone wrote:
> I have a laptop with 500GB storage space.  I initiated a Windows 7 
> install first but it failed since the DVD I had of it was corrupted.  
> Onto installing Fedora.
>
> During the install of Fedora I created an Extended Partition for /boot 
> and the LVM which would contain /home / and /var.  I initially set the 
> bootloader on /boot on the Extended Partition, but of course it was 
> not able to boot from the Extended.  I should have known that.  I 
> later put it on one of the partitions I allocated for Windows, I 
> believe the 100MB partition that is created for a Windows 7 Install 
> and I was able to boot into my fresh install.
>
> The problem I'm having now is that I am unable to boot from CD it 
> seems.  I tried with Windows 7 and a CentOS DVD I have.  Nothing.  I 
> checked the BIOS and the DVD-ROM has priority to boot first but it 
> isn't...it goes to grub almost immediate.  I can't perform an install 
> if I can't do that.  Is there any way to resolve this?
>
> -- 
>
> Brandon Antone
>

-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier

770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
linuxdude AT c3energy.com