Post a Comment On: Ken Shirriff's blog

Dual-booting Windows 7 and Linux is mostly straightforward, but I ran into a few problems. The following notes describe my setup, mostly for my own benefit. If you're looking for a comprehensive dual-boot tutorial, try apc or Loko. My setup I'm running Windows 7 and Fedora 11 Linux on a Gateway SX2800. Partitioning I use the Gnome Partition Editior (GParted). Windows 7 conveniently includes a partition software under Disk Management, but inconveniently it can't shrink a volume by a large amount. My partitioning setup is a bit crazy. Because I bought my computer before Windows 7 was released, I used Windows 7 beta until I got the official upgrade DVD. One unpleasant surprise is you have to reinstall to get from the beta to Windows 7 Home Premium; you can't just upgrade. I had an empty E: partition, so I installed the offical release there, transferred my files with Windows Easy Transfer, and then spent an evening reinstalling all my software. I store most of my data on a FAT32 partition D:to avoid messing around with NTFS on Fedora. You'll probably want something simpler than what I have, but my partition table is: $fdisk /dev/sda ... Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 1698 13631488 27 Unknown /dev/sda2 * 1699 14445 102390277+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda3 14446 27193 102398310 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda4 27194 77825 406701540 5 Extended /dev/sda5 27194 28289 8803588+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda6 28290 70176 336457296 b W95 FAT32 /dev/sda7 70177 77825 61440561 83 Linux sda1 is a mysterious Gateway recovery partition, sda2 is C:, sda3 is E:, sda6 is D: for most of my data, and sda7 is the Linux partition. /etc/fstab /dev/sda7 / ext3 defaults 1 1 tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0 proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/sda5 swap swap defaults 0 0 /dev/sda6 /d vfat auto,rw,user,sync,exec,dev,suid,uid=500,gid=500,umask=000 0 2 My GRUB config default=1 timeout=5 splashimage=(hd0,2)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz hiddenmenu title Fedora (2.6.30.9-96.fc11.i586) root (hd0,6) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.30.9-96.fc11.i586 ro root=/dev/sda7 rhgb quiet initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.30.9-96.fc11.i586.img title Windows 7 rootnoverify (hd0,1) chainloader +1 Note the off-by-one: (hd0,6) boots off sda7. For Windows, you need to specify the partition with the Windows boot loader; if I try to boot E: directly with (hd0,2), I get BOOTMGR IS MISSING. Editing the GRUB config from Linux rescue boot Invariably I end up unable to boot Linux from my disk. To fix this, I boot from my Linux CD and then fix the GRUB config. The following assumes sda7 is the Linux partition: mount /mnt /dev/sda7 cd /mnt/boot/grub vi menu.lst grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda Editing the Windows boot loader configuration If you have multiple versions of Windows, you'll need to configure the Windows boot loader through bcdedit: details. Other random errors My Fedora Core boot failed with an infinite loop of "init: ttyx respawning too fast, stopped". The solution was to change selinux=enforcing to selinux=permissive in /etc/selinux/config. Conclusion The above notes are mostly for my own benefit the next time I need to configure GRUB, but maybe they'll help someone else. Disclaimer: it's very easy to lose data or mess up your system so it won't boot. Back everything up and make sure you have Linux and Windows rescue disks. Don't blame me if things go wrong.