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#1 2013-02-04 08:09:01

timelaw
Member
Registered: 2013-02-04
Posts: 30

Arch triple boot with Win 7 and Ubuntu 12.04?

Hey!

Just wanted to ask if it would work if I installed Arch on a seperate, new, harddrive and just updated the existing GRUB 2 to include it in the boot list of GRUB. Windows' boot is still main but i get thrown to GRUB's list after Windows' boot loader is done.

Anyway, so I just wanted to know if that was possible. I'm a complete newbie to Arch but my friend has been telling me to try it out for a while so I promised him I'd do it. smile

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#2 2013-02-04 08:32:25

olive
Member
From: Belgium
Registered: 2008-06-22
Posts: 1,490

Re: Arch triple boot with Win 7 and Ubuntu 12.04?

timelaw wrote:

Hey!

Just wanted to ask if it would work if I installed Arch on a seperate, new, harddrive and just updated the existing GRUB 2 to include it in the boot list of GRUB. Windows' boot is still main but i get thrown to GRUB's list after Windows' boot loader is done.

Anyway, so I just wanted to know if that was possible. I'm a complete newbie to Arch but my friend has been telling me to try it out for a while so I promised him I'd do it. smile

I believe it will work but I don't understand all these utterly complicated grub scripts. If that does not work, you can simply edit the grub.cfg directly (or use syslinux) and disable grub-mkconfig on both distros. This is not quite hard and is well documented in this Gentoo wiki: http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GRUB2. But I dont't understand quite well you first question. Have you chainloaded grub from the Windows bootloader?

Last edited by olive (2013-02-04 08:34:46)

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#3 2013-02-04 16:02:18

David Batson
Member
Registered: 2011-10-13
Posts: 640

Re: Arch triple boot with Win 7 and Ubuntu 12.04?

Offhand, it depends.  I don't believe you can install Arch to sda1 and then have that change to sdb1 and expect it to boot.  If you have both drives connected when you install Arch, then I believe it should work.  I imagine the safe way would be to mount an .iso image of the Arch CD/DVD in your primary drive, then point Arch to install on your secondary drive.

The best way, if the option is available to you is to use the BIOS boot manager to select which drive to boot.  On my ThinkPad, I can press F12 at the ThinkPad splash screen and the BIOS boot menu pops up.  Whichever drive I select will be sda (or the C: drive in Windows).

Got to go now.

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#4 2013-02-04 17:53:00

olive
Member
From: Belgium
Registered: 2008-06-22
Posts: 1,490

Re: Arch triple boot with Win 7 and Ubuntu 12.04?

David Batson wrote:

Offhand, it depends.  I don't believe you can install Arch to sda1 and then have that change to sdb1 and expect it to boot.  If you have both drives connected when you install Arch, then I believe it should work.  I imagine the safe way would be to mount an .iso image of the Arch CD/DVD in your primary drive, then point Arch to install on your secondary drive.

If it is correctly configured (using only LABEL or UUID), it will boot whatever the drive is. This feature is important if we want to install on a USB hard disk, because the device is not at all guaranteed.

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#5 2013-02-04 22:16:36

timelaw
Member
Registered: 2013-02-04
Posts: 30

Re: Arch triple boot with Win 7 and Ubuntu 12.04?

Uhm, so I don't really quite understand any of the posts. I got what you all meant but my question still stands. Which was:

I have Win 7 on sda1, and Ubuntu on sda4 or something. These partitions in between are data for Windows (a D:\ drive) and the boot partition for Ubuntu. And then there's a swap. The boot, sda4 and the swap are all under a logical partition.

Would I be able to shrink the Ubuntu drive and make a new drive under the logical one and install Arch on that, and the go into Ubuntu and update GRUB and include Arch in the boot list?

So basically, can I just install it to that drive (I regret about the USB one, not a good idea) and point the already existing GRUB to show Arch?

olive wrote:

Have you chainloaded grub from the Windows bootloader?

If this is what I think it means, yes.

I have Windows' boot manager which only passes the question over the GRUB if I choose to boot Ubuntu. So I have to choose Ubuntu twice basically. Or go back to Windows before the timer runs out, or whatever. Is this chainloading?

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#6 2013-02-05 07:24:51

olive
Member
From: Belgium
Registered: 2008-06-22
Posts: 1,490

Re: Arch triple boot with Win 7 and Ubuntu 12.04?

timelaw wrote:

Uhm, so I don't really quite understand any of the posts. I got what you all meant but my question still stands. Which was:

I have Win 7 on sda1, and Ubuntu on sda4 or something. These partitions in between are data for Windows (a D:\ drive) and the boot partition for Ubuntu. And then there's a swap. The boot, sda4 and the swap are all under a logical partition.

sda4 is a primary partition. logical partitions begin at number 5.

timelaw wrote:

Would I be able to shrink the Ubuntu drive and make a new drive under the logical one and install Arch on that, and the go into Ubuntu and update GRUB and include Arch in the boot list?

You didn't ask about shrinking partitions in your first question. You can repartition your hard drive (shrinking the necessary partition) with gparted; you can boot it with the system rescue CD which is very useful for these kind of purpose ( http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage ).

timelaw wrote:

So basically, can I just install it to that drive (I regret about the USB one, not a good idea) and point the already existing GRUB to show Arch?

Yes you can and this is what I was mentioning in my first reply. If grub is already installed (though, you might have to reinstall it if you repartition); simply regenerate the grub.cfg file with grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg in the distribution that is in charge for grub should just work. In case of problems it might be easier to make a custom grub.cfg directly (well documented in the Gentoo wiki and not so difficult).

timelaw wrote:
olive wrote:

Have you chainloaded grub from the Windows bootloader?

If this is what I think it means, yes.

I have Windows' boot manager which only passes the question over the GRUB if I choose to boot Ubuntu. So I have to choose Ubuntu twice basically. Or go back to Windows before the timer runs out, or whatever. Is this chainloading?

Yes this seems to be chainloading. But this setup is not the default in any distribution that I know. Have you played with Windows system command (bootcfg or the like) to have this setup?

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#7 2013-02-05 07:36:11

David Batson
Member
Registered: 2011-10-13
Posts: 640

Re: Arch triple boot with Win 7 and Ubuntu 12.04?

timelaw wrote:

Would I be able to shrink the Ubuntu drive and make a new drive under the logical one and install Arch on that, and the go into Ubuntu and update GRUB and include Arch in the boot list?

In theory, that should work.  I do something similar, I have Windows 7, Arch XFCE, Fedora 18 E16, and Mageia 2 KDE all installed on one hard drive.  I am using Arch's GRUB2 as the boot manager for all.  I followed Arch's GRUB2 wiki for adding the other distros to Arch's grub.cfg.  What you want to do if you choose to use Ubuntu's GRUB is install Arch's GRUB to the root partition of the new install ( / ).

I recently replaced Fedora 17 with Fedora 18, and Fedora's new installer replaced Arch's GRUB before I knew it.  There is an esoteric way to prevent this with Fedora's new installer, but I didn't know it at the time.  I was able to reinstall Arch's GRUB after the fact from within Arch, so all is well.  As I haven't installed Arch in over a year (Arch is a rolling distro), not sure how user friendly Arch's current installer is.

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#8 2013-02-05 07:48:45

olive
Member
From: Belgium
Registered: 2008-06-22
Posts: 1,490

Re: Arch triple boot with Win 7 and Ubuntu 12.04?

David Batson wrote:

I recently replaced Fedora 17 with Fedora 18, and Fedora's new installer replaced Arch's GRUB before I knew it.  There is an esoteric way to prevent this with Fedora's new installer, but I didn't know it at the time.  I was able to reinstall Arch's GRUB after the fact from within Arch, so all is well.  As I haven't installed Arch in over a year (Arch is a rolling distro), not sure how user friendly Arch's current installer is.

Normally, The Ubuntu grub (or whatever distro) should detect arch and add a menu entry to it. Arch installer is not user friendly (at least for the usual definition of "user friendly). In fact there is no real installer; you have to install it by hand with the help of a few scripts and a wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_Guide.

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