Install Windows Using Easybcd

[Alexia Borson]

Aftertrying to upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04, Ubuntu is no longer able to boot, so I tried to uninstall Ubuntu completely and then reinstall it. Following these directions, I tried using EasyBCD to bypass the GRUB2 bootloader so that after uninstalling, it would automatically boot into Windows 7.

If the old BCD cannot be found, chances are your partition layout changed, either deliberately or done by the Ubuntu installer. Try to roll back the partition changes, or use the repair console on a Windows 7 installation DVD and enter:

Then I installed Win7 onto that 250GB partition. Installation went smoothly and I was successfully booted into Win7 and setting everything up. After I was done doing all the stupid updates from Microsof, I thought I was done and I wanted to go back to Ubuntu.

I am not sure if you are still having this problem, but like Mahmoud said, EasyBCD is not a third party bootloader at all. It sounds like you might have skipped a step in using easybcd to point the bootloader to the right place where Ubuntu is.

First, here is some reading you should skim over:

1. Here is a solution regarding the alert you got. Read that first.

2. Here is a video that shows a walkthrough for using EasyBCD.

3. Here is a detailed guide to adding ubuntu to the windows bootloader and setting the two up using EasyBCD. And it has nice screenshots with explanations.

4. Here is yet another guide for using EasyBCD.

So what you are doing with EasyBCD is adding Ubuntu to the Windows Bootloader. The GRUB2 bootloader is going to be installed on your external hard drive, so what you want to do is point the Windows Bootloader to boot GRUB2, which should point to the partition that is your external. Then, the windows bootloader will pass you off to GRUB, from where you should be able to select ubuntu. It might help to check out the GRUB2 tutorial reference to get an idea of how GRUB works.

My windows installation was working perfectly fine until i clicked "Reset BCD" in EasyBCD in Windows 8. After clicking that EasyBCD told me to add Win 8 entry via Add Entry Menu so i did. After restart, win 8 would not start. Neither would recovery F11.

Leap 15.1 is not seeing the installation of Windows 7 or Windows 10

and I can no longer boot to Windows after I install Leap 15.1

Before installing SUSE, Windows 7 and 10 dual boot fine with

EasyBCD, but when I install SUSE Leap15, I can lo longer boot to

Windows and the installer does not see the two operating systems.

How do I install Leap 15 so it sees Windows and permits me to build

a native boot menu with EasyBCD ?

I used Clonezilla and cloned my Win-7 / Win10 dual boot system with the extra partitions to another drive and the did a test install based on your recommendations.

It is now running fine with Grub2 and booting from MBR. However it does not see the two Windows partitions.

My goal would be to rebuild the MBR back to windows-compliant and use EasyBCD to create the three-item menu

Windows 7 Professional

Windows 10 Professional

OpenSUSE Leap v15.1

Ordinarily, the openSUSE install will run os-prober to discover the existing Windows OS installation and create a grub2 entry for chainloading, if that failed for some reason then you may need to create that entry manually.

Per the last update instructions, I scanned for packages with files in /bin and /sbin and among them was grub. Half without thinking, I uninstalled grub (legacy), thinking I used syslinux. Wrong! I use syslinux on my personal laptop, but this is my dual booting work laptop. So... my time is limited before I'll need to reboot into Windows and won't be able to boot Arch without fixing the bootloader.

I used this article (well, I wrote that article after going through the process) to set up dual boot on a Windows 7 machine with MBR/full disk encryption. I just looked through the manual installation instructions for syslinux and just want to get some input before I go for the install. Here's my current partition setup:

Again, I just want to verify this before attempting. I've not tried this sort of setup with syslinux. I won't mark sda2 as bootable since I need to use Windows' bootloader so that it is unlocked during boot up; trying to load it from a Linux bootloader will fail as it's encrypted.

Update: I went ahead and installed syslinux, but EasyBCD on Windows doesn't appear to be picking it up. It appears that EasyBCD copies the mbr for the given linux boot loader to Windows. I did the following:

Is this how I'm supposed to do it if [alt]mbr.bin is not going to be written to the actual MBR (sda), but written to a separate partition instead? Somehow EasyBCD still brings me to a grub prompt when I boot up -- I can't tell where it's finding it since I moved /boot/grub to /boot/grub.bk and have reformated /dev/sda2 prior to the above. I think EasyBCD is keeping a clone of the grub MBR perhaps and still trying to use it despite adding a syslinux entry...

I wrote this part, and you have to scroll down a ways to get to it, as the syslinux page is getting quite long. Basically you use extlinux with the "-i" switch and then give it an argument of where the syslinux config is you want it to use (ie. /mnt/boot/syslinux or /boot/syslinux or /mnt/syslinux or etc.). It uses the location of the config directory to determine what partition to write to, and then takes care of it.

It's also hard for me to figure out if I have a syslinux issue or an issue with EasyBCD, which I need to use to chainload syslinux since my computer has an encrypted MBR via McAfee Endpoint Encryption (work). I used EasyBCD fine with grub... so I think it should be fine with syslinux. I just can't tell if syslinux is for sure installed correctly. Post #2 has my most recent and documented attempt -- is there anything in it that diverges from what you're advising? Or does it look like I did everything correctly?

I see what you are saying now. No do not dd to the MBR, as you will overwrite the windows bootloader (is this what is called EasyBCD?). The idea is that you now need to use the configuration of the windows bootloader to tell it to chainload to a partition (your linux partition). So the installation of extlinux to the partition should be complete. I'm unsure of what exactly it writes the the partition boot record, but that command is the for a partition the equivalent of doing a dd to the MBR. I am unsure that dd'ing the PBR is actually even a reliable thing to do... as I have not ever seen a good example of this. I would imagine you would actually have to find the precise offset somehow.

It should be fine to dd the filesystem to /dev/sda2 then use extlinux to install it. I cannot see how this would goof anything up, and if you did indeed happen to manage that, it would tell you about it when you tried to install extlinux to the partition. You do need to ensure that you are using a filesystem that is compatible with extlinux. Offhand I cannot think of what those filesystems are, but I am fairly certain that it can handle ext2,3,4 (four is what I am the most iffy about) and I think it can handle vfat. If you are using something of questionable comaptibility it is probably best to look into the documentation and see what is up. Worst case, you can simply use the grub-legacy package from the AUR and do it that way. I also think you can force grub2 to install the the PBR, but I am not certain on that... grub2 freaks me out in how little control it makes me feel like I have.

I'm wondering if since I don't have a menu.c32, perhaps that's why it's just sitting there with a blinking cursor. I have a basic syslinux.cfg... but no menu.c32. I don't think I'll need chain.c32 since I'm not going to be loading anything else, just using EasyBCD to chain syslinux.

I really appreciate the help! I'll give a whirl to adding the syslinux menu and see if that helps; knowing which order to do the above two steps would be great. The wiki has `extlinux --install` first and then `dd ...`. Your comment kind of made it seem like I should do it the other way around. I posted on the EasyBCD support forum but I'm not sure that the answer really helped much. I can't tell if he's distinguishing between the MBR and the partition boot sector because dd-ing mbr.gin to the partition won't work, or if he was just correcting my terminology?

As far as I know EasyBCD just makes some sort of local copy of the installed bootloader and uses that on Windows startup since I can't get to the encrypted MBR myself from Linux, only when Windows is running.

No I'm not suggesting to dd any kind of mbr file to the partition. I thought you were indicating that you had dd'ed the entire partition to where it was now, as in you moved the filesystem from one place to another. I would definitely not recommend dd'ing the mbr.bin to the beginning of the partition unless you can find some documentation that indicated that the beginning of a partition is exactly the same as the beginning of a disk (which I don't think it is).

You do need to copy the necessary support files to the syslinux configuration directory just as you always have. This is in the wiki actually. Though I guess typically people are used to using the syslinux-install_update command, which handles this for you. I guess you only need the supporting files that are specified in your config though, so if your config specifies menu.c32 then you need that in there. If you are chainloading then I would imagine you need the chain.c32.

I'm going to try again but just omit the last step. I'm still a bit confused about this, as I thought a bootloader had to be "installed" somewhere other than just (a) file(s) on the boot partition. What tells the system to boot syslinux, or perhaps more specifically, doesn't some baked in binary need to know to access /dev/sda2 files before /dev/sda2 is even mounted? Without some sort of binary dd'd somewhere, I wouldn't figure that syslinux would know what to do upon boot.

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