windows 7 and ubuntu dual boot

killernerd

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 8, 2012
Messages
215
Normally this is pretty easy but not in this case...

So my main OS is windows 7 professional, when windows 8 came out i freed up some hard drive space (about 50 gb since i wasn't really going to do much with it initially) and installed it in a dual boot setup. I was just going to screw around with it since i got it for free (gotta love dreamspark premium :D ).

My laptop started using the seeing windows 8 as my primary OS for some reason (even though win 7 was installed first). It didn't really bother me though since the win 8 bootloader looked pretty and worked well.

Didn't really like win8 and none of my drivers worked anyway so i set my default OS back to win 7 and kinda forgot it was there. My laptop also started using the win 7 bootloader again, which was a shame because it offers far less functionality but w/e.

Now I have to install ubuntu for some projects and I thought: perfect, I can simply use the partition used by windows 8!
So i load up ubuntu through my usb and start the installer but when i come to the partition selection screen it gives me 3 options:

1. install alongside windows 8 (why it only detects windows 8 I don't know...)
2. remove windows 8 and install ubuntu (would wipe entire disk, including the windows 7 partition)
3. do the complicated stuff yourself and create your own partitions.

I don't really want to screw around with the partitions yourself so I restart the laptop and go back in windows 7. I open up the disk manager tool and remove the windows 8 partition so it's now unallocated disk space.

That should force ubuntu into detecting windows 7 I thought. I was wrong.
It gave me the exact same options as before so now i select "install alongside windows 8" which it did.

Reboot laptop after installation and... nothing. No bootloader or anything, it simply boots into windows 7 as if nothing happened. Which makes sense i suppose. Win8 is no longer installed and my system didn't use the win8 bootloader in the first place.

I have no clue how to fix this, which is why I'm here. I removed the ubuntu partition again (so it's unallocated disk space once more) so I can do it decently in one go.

thanks :3
 
If everything is back to normal, you should just run Ubuntu as a virtual machine. Unless there is some sort of compatibility issue, running a VM is easier then dual booting since you don't have to deal with any sort of boot loader issue.
 
that's an option but i still prefer a dual boot solution because I don't like the idea of my ubuntu files depending on the integrity of my windows installation.

If windows goes bad so would my ubunty and I'm actually planning on using ubuntu more than windows so yeah.
 
I would try option 1. If that does not work its not so hard to get grub2 to chainload windows.
 
So i tried option 1 again and now it worked... somehow...

The only thing that remains odd is that, in linux's bootloader, my windows partition is detected as being windows 8 rather than windows 7 but oh well.

funfact: linux automatically installed all the needed drivers and only required permission for 2 (nvidia and wlan driver), all in all it took 5 minutes. Trying to install the dell drivers on both the win7 x64 and win 8 x64 installation took me several DAYS of googling and trying because they wouldn't work...

Go linux :D
 
that's an option but i still prefer a dual boot solution because I don't like the idea of my ubuntu files depending on the integrity of my windows installation.

If windows goes bad so would my ubunty and I'm actually planning on using ubuntu more than windows so yeah.

You can backup the Virtual Machine to any device. So maintain a usb drive backup or whatever you like and restore in case of a failure of the hardware or something happens to either install.

If you got it to work grats. Nothing like old school I guess. :p
 
that's an option but i still prefer a dual boot solution because I don't like the idea of my ubuntu files depending on the integrity of my windows installation.

If windows goes bad so would my ubunty and I'm actually planning on using ubuntu more than windows so yeah.

Why wouldn't you just recover from a backup?
 
Performance in VMs is kind of awful though. Especially when you really want to rely on native graphics drivers for a true experience.
 
Back
Top