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#1 2013-02-05 17:53:51

MariusK
Member
Registered: 2013-02-05
Posts: 7

GRUB issues with Win7

Evening,

I will try to make things as clear as possible.
My Laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad x230i, with 16 GiB of RAM, i3-3310m 2.4GHz Dualcore, a 500 GiB HDD (sda) and a 128 GiB Crucial M4 mSata SSd (sdb). Will add details if necessary. Hopefully I am at the right place, this problem seemed more related to Installation than to Laptops.

My situation is as follows:

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 465,8G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   417G  0 part ; data, ntfs
└─sda2   8:2    0  48,9G  0 part ; data, ntfs
sdb      8:16   0 119,2G  0 disk 
├─sdb1   8:17   0    78G  0 part ; Win7
├─sdb2   8:18   0  14,5G  0 part /
└─sdb3   8:19   0  26,6G  0 part /home

Win7's 100MiB boot partition, which existed when I installed archlinux in december, got lost in the process, but is not part of the problem (anymore)
GRUB is installed on sdb but is unable to boot into windows. I had added

### Windows 7
menuentry 'Windows 7 Professional' {
        set root='hd1,1'
        chainloader +1
}

to grub.cfg. Selecting Windows only shows "BOOTMGR is missing, Press Ctrl Alt Del to restart". I do realize this is a rather common problem but was unable to apply any of the solutions to my problem.

What I can do:
archlinux boots perfectly fine via GRUB.
I can boot into Win7 with Grub-Rescue-disk (USB)
I can use the Win7 installation media to fix the MBR, in which case Windows boots just fine, archlinux obviously does not.
I can however use grub-rescue disk to boot into archlinux, and reinstall GRUB which puts me back into starting situation.

Thanks in advance

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#2 2013-02-05 18:00:43

phil
Member
Registered: 2012-09-22
Posts: 72

Re: GRUB issues with Win7

Have you installed os-prober?
https://www.archlinux.org/packages/comm … os-prober/
If not, you could install this and let grub search for all OS on your system.

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#3 2013-02-05 18:27:00

MariusK
Member
Registered: 2013-02-05
Posts: 7

Re: GRUB issues with Win7

phil wrote:

Have you installed os-prober?
https://www.archlinux.org/packages/comm … os-prober/
If not, you could install this and let grub search for all OS on your system.

os-probe results in:

No volume groups found
/dev/sdb1:Windows 7 (loader):Windows:chain

Not sure what I'm supposed to do with thits information, my Win7 entry in grub.cfg seems just fine

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#4 2013-02-10 10:26:52

nowahn
Member
From: elsewhere
Registered: 2008-12-05
Posts: 75

Re: GRUB issues with Win7

Hi,

Did you see this section of the grub wiki ?


take time to daydream, inspiration comes ...

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#5 2013-02-10 10:37:03

WonderWoofy
Member
From: Los Gatos, CA
Registered: 2012-05-19
Posts: 8,414

Re: GRUB issues with Win7

You know, I think that sure the Windows MBR is able to boot itself, but typically when you boot windows from a Linux bootloader, you point it to the windows system partition.  This is the partition that you seem to indicate is "no longer the problem".  But I think that is exactly your problem. 

I am not sure if this is possible, but can you somehow load the windows bootloader onto the partition superblock?  That is have it installed to sdb1 instead of sdb?  then you could have grub chainload to the secondary bootloader instead?  Again, not sure if windows will even allow that.

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#6 2013-02-22 20:24:18

MariusK
Member
Registered: 2013-02-05
Posts: 7

Re: GRUB issues with Win7

I'm sorry for my late response, but now that my exams are over I have time to tackle the problem again.

WonderWoofy wrote:

You know, I think that sure the Windows MBR is able to boot itself, but typically when you boot windows from a Linux bootloader, you point it to the windows system partition.  This is the partition that you seem to indicate is "no longer the problem".  But I think that is exactly your problem. 

I am not sure if this is possible, but can you somehow load the windows bootloader onto the partition superblock?  That is have it installed to sdb1 instead of sdb?  then you could have grub chainload to the secondary bootloader instead?  Again, not sure if windows will even allow that.

The problem is that the 100mb system-reserved partition does no longer exist. I have restored the windows Bootmgr now, but I have no idea where the Boot files are located. I don't know and quite think you can restore said system partition. And if I understand you correctly, what you are discribing is the original setup, that was supposed to work, but did not.

I'm trying to find out about windows boot partition now.
I might also do a fresh install of arch ( possibly with a boot partition?) if the chances are this changes something.

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