Dual booting with windows 7

eroge008 · 2013-01-17 21:35:00

Long story short, I wanted to try out arch, unfortunately, since I already have my laptop running a gentoo installation that has been months in the making and I doon't want to give that up, and my desktop also needs to run windows so that my parents can use it, I'm forced into a situation in which I need to dual boot and so far, I have been having problems since this is my first time manually setting up a dual boot. I think that I figured it out, but I wanted to make sure.

So, windows sets up an MBR partition right? Do I just mnt this to /mnt/boot and then continue to set up everything as if I was just installing arch regularly?

anonymous_user · 2013-01-17 21:53:24

You can have GRUB automatically detect Windows by having os-prober installed when configuring it. Also did you read the wiki page on GRUB:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Grub#Dual-booting

eroge008 · 2013-01-17 22:05:45

Yes I read all of it. It honestly was either not very clear, or just didn't work for me. Will it not work doing what I just suggested?

eroge008 · 2013-01-17 22:06:54

Even after I did that, the grub boot menu did not have windows listed btw.

eroge008 · 2013-01-17 22:11:47

Also, another problem that I had was that genfstab did not recognize windows, I'm guessing that's because I didn't have that partition mounted though.

anonymous_user · 2013-01-17 22:19:41

You can add the Windows partition to fstab later so don't worry about that. Also you do not need to need to mount your Windows partition for grub-mkconfig to detect them.

What is your current partition setup like? Post the output of fdisk -l (run it as root obviously).

eroge008 · 2013-01-17 22:57:29

I decided to just start from scratch. So right now win is installing. My current partition scheme is:

/dev/sda1 primary 250mb fs: ext2 (boot)
/dev/sda2 primary 30gb fs: NTFS (Windows)
/dev/sda3 primary 500gb fs: ext4 (Arch)
/dev/sda4 primary 500gb fs: ext4 (Later usage maybe trying out LFS)

I just decided to make it simple and it also allows me extra space for whatever I decide to do later with all that space that I'll never use.

When I originally posted this, I already was dual booting windows and xubuntu, my plan was just to wipe xub since mostly everything else would be pretty much the same grub-wise. The scheme was:

/dev/sda1 primary 100mb fs: NTFS (MBR)
/dev/sda2 primary 250gb fs:NTFS (Windows)
/dev/sda3 primary 30gb fs: ext4 (root)
/dev/sda5 logical 250mb fs: ext2 (boot)
/dev/sda6 logical rest-of-drive fs: ext4 (home)

anonymous_user · 2013-01-17 23:03:50

You might want to have Windows be the first partition instead of boot.

eroge008 · 2013-01-17 23:21:12

Yea my bad that is exactly how it's set up. That's what I get for posting it by hand and from memory. I forgot about that little windows issue. I hate windows . I wish I could just wipe it, but I don't have the time to show my parents how to use linux lol.

Arch Linux

#1 2013-01-17 21:35:00

Dual booting with windows 7

#2 2013-01-17 21:53:24

Re: Dual booting with windows 7

#3 2013-01-17 22:05:45

Re: Dual booting with windows 7

#4 2013-01-17 22:06:54

Re: Dual booting with windows 7

#5 2013-01-17 22:11:47

Re: Dual booting with windows 7

#6 2013-01-17 22:19:41

Re: Dual booting with windows 7

#7 2013-01-17 22:57:29

Re: Dual booting with windows 7

#8 2013-01-17 23:03:50

Re: Dual booting with windows 7

#9 2013-01-17 23:21:12

Re: Dual booting with windows 7

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