windows7 dual boot

[Chris Robinson]

----- Original Message ----

From: Adrian J de Bruyn <adrian at debruyn.net.au>
To: Ubuntu AU List <ubuntu-au at lists.ubuntu.com>
Sent: Sat, 9 April, 2011 9:08:45 AM
Subject: windows7 dual boot

G'day all
Being a newbie I might be asking for something resolved long ago. I tried to
install 10.10 alongside windows7. But no success. It installs all right, I
think, but when booting it reverts back to Windows without giving me a
choice.
What am I doing wrong?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Probably nothing you are doing.  From my reading of Ubuntu Forums, there appears 
to be a bug in the installer in 10.10 (Very regrettable - a bad intro to a great 
OS)

I don't dual boot with Windows so I'm unable to test it.  From what you are 
describing it seems that grub does not get installed correctly.  One way around 
this would be to specify the partitions manually, as this advanced mode does not 
have any problems.  If you're going to do this I would highly recommend setting 
up a separate /home partition because that allows you to re-install, upgrade, 
repair etc the / (root) partition that the OS sits on at will, without risking 
your important data and settings.

So, you would have a Windows partition (NTFS), a Linux boot partition (ext4, 
15-20 GB recommended), a /home partition (ext4, as big as you can spare) and a 
swap partition (at least the size of your installed RAM recommended).  Specifiy 
sda (first hard drive) as the device to install grub onto and it should work 
perfectly giving you the option to boot into either Windows or Ubuntu.

If you don't feel comfortable with the more advanced manual setup, you might 
want to try the 10.04 release which should work fine.  10.04 is the LTS (long 
term support) release and is perfectly fine, in fact it's the most stable 
current release and the one I recommend for newcomers to Linux.

It's also possible that you just need to install grub to the hard drive from the 
LiveCD.  Go over to ubuntuforums.org and ask for help from the knowledgeable 
folks over there. (Because I've never had to do it this way) 


BTW, if you want to be able to access your ext 4 partitions, particularly /home 
from windows, just install the open source ext2 driver under Windows.

Chris