dual booting Ubuntu 13.04 and Windows 7

[Liam Proven]

On 28 May 2013 14:22, Gerhard Magnus <magnus at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
> On 05/28/2013 05:22 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
>>
>> On 28 May 2013 06:11, Basil Chupin <blchupin at iinet.net.au> wrote:
>>>
>>> As the OP states above:
>>>
>>>
>>> "I bought a new box with the Intel DB75EN motherboard that uses the
>>> UEFI standard and DPT partitioning for the hard drives.
>>
>>
>>
>> Yeah, that is the problem. There is no such thing as DPT that I know of.
>>
>> --
>
> Sorry for the typo -- it's GPT, not DPT.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

I thought probably so, but with things like this, you really do have
to be super-careful.

IIRC, "DPT" was a maker of caching hard disk controllers way back when.

> When it comes to booting, things aren't quite as simple as they used to be.
>
> My original post on this matter probably included too much fdisk and gparted
> data and was ignored -- so I simplified the story slightly before posting
> again. Another mistake, as a detail I left out turned out to be important.

That is unfortunate.

> The computer has TWO hard drives: the primary (1TB) and a solid state
> secondary (180GB).

OK, first, let me stop you there. These are SATA drives, I presume? (I
don't think there ever were EIDE drives as big as 1TB, nor SSDs.)

The terms "primary" and "secondary" don't really apply to SATA. This
is not nit-picking - I think that this is/was part of your problem.

With SATA, all drives are standalone. Sometimes, in the firmware, you
can set a boot order and tell the firmware to look at a particular
drive first, or even several drives in a sequence. The ports on the
motherboard are usually numbered, e.g. 1/2/3/4. Sometimes in the
firmware you can tell it that the boot sequence should be, say:

[1] optical drive
[2] SATA 3
[3] SATA 1
[4] USB

If you have/had your 1TB spinning disk on port #1 and the SSD on port
#2, and the firmware was set to boot from #1, then when you put GRUB
on disk #2, it would be ignored. I am taking an educated guess that
this is what happened. When you put GRUB on the SSD, you should also
have changed your firmware boot order to look at #2 before #1. If you
cannot do this, then you should have changed the drive connections so
that the SSD was on #1 and the HD on #2.

> I had the primary partitioned as 250GB and 750GB at the
> shop and Windows 7 installed on the 250GB partition. My plan for dual
> booting with Ubuntu 13.04 was to put "/" on the much faster secondary drive
> and "/home" on the 250GB partition of the primary. This made it necessary to
> use the "Something else" option on the installation menu. I put the boot
> loader on /dev/sda (the old procedure for dual booting.)
>
> If I'd used either of the other two options -- "erase disk and install
> Ubuntu" or "install Ubuntu alongside Windows" I think my initial attempt at
> installing would have worked.

Possibly!  I never like to trust the automatic options myself - I
prefer to trust my own decision-making.

> I was finally successful after
> this:
>
> (1) Use a Live CD to install boot-repair and repair the MBR on the primary

This is one of the problems I am having understanding what is going
on. In theory, a 1TB drive formatted with GPT does not /have/ an MBR.
GPT is an alternative to MBR.

If perhaps you mean "boot sector" or something like that, I am sorry
to quibble, but it is important to say so!

> (2) Install Xubuntu 12.04 (LTS) on the primary using the "erase disk and
> install" option (which, as I mentioned, can handle the new GPT MBR
> configuration in a way that is "transparent to the user")

Again, it is GPT /or/ MBR, as I understand it, not both.


> (3) Use the Live CD and gparted to shrink the Xubuntu partition on the
> primary down to 20GB and partition the remainder as ext4
> (4) Install Ubuntu 13.04 with "/" on the secondary drive, "/home" on the
> 980GB partition of the primary, and the bootloader on the secondary
> (/dev/sdb).
>
> So I have Ubuntu 13.04 up and running (it's extremely fast) and an Xubuntu
> to experiment with.

I am glad to hear it.

> Maybe I can get Windows 7 to work if I install it on another hard drive and
> make sure the installation doesn't go anywhere near the primary drive that
> has Ubuntu on it! Or I may try one of Liam's suggestions as I really don't
> like Microsoft.

Re-order the drives, make the SSD #1 - i.e. /dev/sda - and the HD #2 -
i.e. /dev/sdb. Check that the firmware boots from #1. Put the
bootloader on sda. Leave Windows on drive #2. Having the bootloader
and / on sda and Windows and /home on sdb should be fine.


--
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