Dual Booting Troubles

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Grant Bowman

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Aug 22, 2010, 10:18:26 PM8/22/10
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Today I spent quite a bit of time working with Irshad's brand new Dell
Inspiron laptop that he unpacked for the first time at Bobby G's.
It's a 300 GB RAM, 4 GB RAM and Core2 Duo 2.6 GHz machine. He
mentioned it was a back to school special with free shipping. Looking
on Dell.com I see a few in the $500 price range, not sure exactly
which model it is. Every time I booted the Windows 7 Home Premium Dell
operating system it would break an otherwise functional grub2 install.
Booting Ubuntu from grub2 multiple times worked fine. The first boot
into windows was fine, then it would come up with an error when
attempting to boot the machine again. Going through that boot cycle
and recovering after failure was time consuming!

I finally got around it by using NeoStart EasyBCD to reinstall and
configure the Windows boot loader. EasyBCD is a nice front end to
bcdedit that comes with Windows. It's downloadable from
http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1 After the Windows boot loader comes
up it chain loads grub2. It seems to work.

All of this was done by installing from Ubuntu desktop-amd64 and using
an alternate disc to rescue the system (install grub2 again) when the
boot loader stopped working altogether.

If anyone else has hands on experience (not speculation) that might
help, let me know.

Cheers,

Grant

Jack Deslippe

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Aug 22, 2010, 10:43:49 PM8/22/10
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Hi Grant,

Glad to hear you got it working at the end.  That was a tremendous effort!

Thanks

Jack

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mim

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Aug 22, 2010, 11:39:40 PM8/22/10
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Thanks from my side too!!! That was indeed a tremendous effort!!

On Aug 22, 7:43 pm, Jack Deslippe <jdes...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Grant,
>
> Glad to hear you got it working at the end.  That was a tremendous effort!
>
> Thanks
>
> Jack
>
> On Aug 22, 2010 7:18 PM, "Grant Bowman" <grant...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Today I spent quite a bit of time working with Irshad's brand new Dell
> > Inspiron laptop that he unpacked for the first time at Bobby G's.
> > It's a 300 GB RAM, 4 GB RAM and Core2 Duo 2.6 GHz machine. He
> > mentioned it was a back to school special with free shipping. Looking
> > on Dell.com I see a few in the $500 price range, not sure exactly
> > which model it is. Every time I booted the Windows 7 Home Premium Dell
> > operating system it would break an otherwise functional grub2 install.
> > Booting Ubuntu from grub2 multiple times worked fine. The first boot
> > into windows was fine, then it would come up with an error when
> > attempting to boot the machine again. Going through that boot cycle
> > and recovering after failure was time consuming!
>
> > I finally got around it by using NeoStart EasyBCD to reinstall and
> > configure the Windows boot loader. EasyBCD is a nice front end to
> > bcdedit that comes with Windows. It's downloadable from
> >http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1After the Windows boot loader comes
> > up it chain loads grub2. It seems to work.
>
> > All of this was done by installing from Ubuntu desktop-amd64 and using
> > an alternate disc to rescue the system (install grub2 again) when the
> > boot loader stopped working altogether.
>
> > If anyone else has hands on experience (not speculation) that might
> > help, let me know.
>
> > Cheers,
>
> > Grant
>
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
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> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
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>
>

Ken Sedgwick

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Aug 31, 2010, 4:25:49 PM8/31/10
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In case you missed this on slashdot ...

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ucgi/~cjwatson/blosxom/debian/2010-08-28-windows-applications-making-grub2-unbootable.html

Regards,

Ken

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Grant Bowman

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Sep 1, 2010, 12:30:52 AM9/1/10
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Hi Ken!

That sounds like what I was fighting. Thanks for the link!

Grant

Larry Cafiero

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Sep 1, 2010, 10:36:06 AM9/1/10
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On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 1:25 PM, Ken Sedgwick <ksed...@gmail.com> wrote:

This came up elsewhere recently -- either a mailing list or on an IRC channel (probably #lindependence) and my first question was "Why would you run Windows software?"  But then, the dual-booting scenario arose.

Another work around: Single boot into Linux.

Glad you got it working, Grant, but again if anyone could get it working, it'd be you.

Larry Cafiero

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