dual booting Ubuntu 13.04 and Windows 7
Gerhard Magnus
magnus at agora.rdrop.com
Tue May 28 15:26:54 UTC 2013
On 05/28/2013 07:23 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
> 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.
>
Thanks for the information. This problem has been maddening and
time-consuming to hack through but I've learned a lot.
I don't understand the details of this GPT partitioning scheme and I
apologize for using the wrong terminology. This is the main reason why
"users" and IT people annoy each other so much -- users don't know the
jargon, or worse, insist -- sometimes vehemently! -- upon using it
incorrectly.
But I was dead in the water -- unable to boot anything but Windows and
then, after I nuked the Windows partition, unable to get anything
besides Windows error messages -- until I used the "repair MBR" option
-- and whatever it's doing -- from the "advanced" panel of the
boot-repair utility. It was the only way I could get rid of whatever
Windows was doing in the loading area of the disk on port 1 and then
install Xubuntu, etc..
Before I used boot-repair I tried re-installing Ubuntu with the
bootloader on the SSD and using the BIOS menu to point to that drive. I
think now that this didn't work because Windows still owned the loading
area on the SSD! (The shop formatted both drives as NTFS.)
I only speculate that I might have avoided these problems by using the
default "install alongside Windows" option from the start because I
think Ric used it successfully with his wife's computer. (BTW Ric,
Garmins are awesome!) I was lazy and didn't want to learn how to
re-partition an existing system on one drive to put / on a new drive
while leaving /home on the old one.
Here's the current gparted data (again, this setup works!) sda1 was
probably created when I ran the "repair MBR" option of boot-repair. As I
was unable to "repair MBR" on the SSD, sdb1 -- with its "mstres" flag --
is the last residue of Windows 7 on my system that prevents me from
booting from this disc.
Parti- File Mount Size Flags
tion System Point
----------------------------------------------
sda1 fat32 /boot/efi 94MB boot
sda2 ext4 18GB <--Xubuntu
sda3 swap 2GB
sda4 ext4 /home 910GB <--Ubuntu
sda5 swap 2GB
sdb1 unknown 128MB mstres
sdb2 ext4 168GB <--Ubuntu
unalo unallocated 2MB
sdb1 has a warning attached:
Unable to detect file system! Possible reasons are:
--The file system is damaged
--The file system is unknown to GParted
--There is no file system available (unformatted)
--The device entry /dev/sdb1 is missing
Here's what fdisk -l has to say:
Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 1953525167 976762583+ ee GPT
Disk /dev/sdb: 180.0 GB, 180045766656 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 21889 cylinders, total 351651888 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 351651887 175825943+ ee GPT
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