[SOLVED]Dual boot Win7 and Arch problems with GRUB2!

c4t4lin · 2015-08-19 12:11:26

UPDATE: Finally I've sold this problem, all I had to do was to add ntldr /bootmgr instead of chainloader +1 to windows entry and now I can boot both OS's fine.
Thanks to all of you who helped me!
*************************************
Hi Arch users!

Here is my problem.
I have a classic BIOS system and 2 HDD's.
First HDD is for Windows and second for Arch. I've installed Arch using the Wiki beginner section and followed everything it says for a BIOS system.

Both HDD's have MBR partition table:
Windows HDD has 3 partitions, with NTFS file system and the OS is installed on sda1.
Arch HDD has 4 partition, all primary, sdb1 - boot (boot flag on), sdb2 - root, sdb3 - swap, sdb4 - home, all ext4 file system.

As said in the wiki I've installed GRUB on sdb, not sdbY.

I've partitioned the HDD with parted and every time a new partition was created it had the LBA flag on, but I've disabled it for all partitions because I didn't know at that time the LBA is recomended.

The funny thing is that Windows was detected by os-prober and a entry was added in GRUB for it. During the installation everything worked fine and at the final I rebooted the system to test if I can dual boot the OS's, but the GRUB menu didn't show, it booted straight into Windows.
I switched the boot order in BIOS of the HDD's, so that the Arch HDD was first, this time GRUB menu showed on screen; Arch booted fine with no problem, but when I tried to boot Windows a black screen with a blinking cursor appeared.

I've read some of the documentation of GRUB here on Arch Wiki, but I couldn't find anything regarding this problem. It's my first time when I try to dual boot Arch and Windows.
The funny thing is that a couple of months ago I've dual booted Windows 7 and Manjaro and everything was perfect, but since Manjaro has a GUI installer I've missed a lot of "behind the scene" stuff.

Any help is much appreciated!

Last edited by c4t4lin (2015-08-25 17:51:03)

Head_on_a_Stick · 2015-08-19 12:21:33

You can try installing GRUB to /dev/sda

Make sure you back up the MBR first:

# dd if=/dev/sda of=mbr.bak bs=512 count=1

You can restore this with:

# dd if=mbr.bak of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

EDIT: Update grub.cfg after installing GRUB to the MBR of /dev/sda

Last edited by Head_on_a_Stick (2015-08-19 12:23:06)

c4t4lin · 2015-08-19 12:26:57

@Head_on_a_Stick
I'll try this and I'll post back if something changes.
Thanks!

Fixxer · 2015-08-19 14:38:08

For proper diagnosis post output of bootinfoscript:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bootinfoscript/ .

Last edited by Fixxer (2015-08-19 14:38:55)

c4t4lin · 2015-08-23 13:16:36

Sorry for not updating this thread but I wasn't home last days, anyway today I've decided to reinstall ArchLinux again and see if this time it will work.

During the installation process I've took a few photos:

As you can see in this image I get a strange message about "FlexNet" written on sector 32, from what I've read it's a DRM. The rest of the text not available in the image tells that this program may cause boot problems.

This is a warning when I run grub-mkconfig.

And this is Windows Entry from grub.cfg.

I will try to post output from bootinfoscript later this day, as Fixxer suggested, but I don't have any experience with command line install.

PS: Nevermind I've found bootinfoscript in AUR. One question: it's possible to mount a partition from my Windows HDD and then use the cat command to output the log of bootinfoscript into a text file ? I think it's something like cat log file > /mnt/sdaX/log.txt; sorry for all this stupid questions, but I've used Manjaro which has a GUI so I wasn't forced to use any of these commands.

Last edited by c4t4lin (2015-08-24 10:29:30)

Fixxer · 2015-08-23 13:20:11

Bootinfoscript will save results in /root/RESULTS.txt file.

Install package nopaste, and then generate http link:

cat /path/to/RESULTS.txt | nopaste

Last edited by Fixxer (2015-08-23 13:33:15)

Head_on_a_Stick · 2015-08-23 13:24:42

c4t4lin wrote:

strange message about "FlexNet" written on sector 32

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1661254

Also, please replace those images with thumbnail links; some of us are on metered and/or crap connections.

c4t4lin · 2015-08-24 12:43:29

Offtopic:
Ok so today I've tinkered a little my Arch system, even if it has that annoying blinking cursor thing when I try to boot from GRUB2 into Windows, I switch to Arch from BIOS.
Anyway I've decided to install xfce4, firefox (Yes I'm writing this post from Arch) and yaourt to ease my work with Arch and everything went great. Even if I installed a desktop environment I just love how powerful terminal commands are.

Ontopic:
@Fixxer: I've build bootinfoscript (which was easier than I thought) and give it a try, got the log and it's up on pastebin Full Log, because I didn't want to make this thread too huge.

@Head_on_a_Stick: I think I will try to zero out sector 32 as described on ubuntu forums, since that problem is kinda similar to my problem, if I don't find other solution. After digging on the Web I've found that there is a lot of software which uses FlexNet DRM(better a rootkit to say) even trial ones so I'll take a look on my Windows registry files to get rid of it, because I've read that even if you erase it from sector 32 it may replicate again when you boot into Windows.

Arch Linux

#1 2015-08-19 12:11:26

[SOLVED]Dual boot Win7 and Arch problems with GRUB2!

#2 2015-08-19 12:21:33

Re: [SOLVED]Dual boot Win7 and Arch problems with GRUB2!

#3 2015-08-19 12:26:57

Re: [SOLVED]Dual boot Win7 and Arch problems with GRUB2!

#4 2015-08-19 14:38:08

Re: [SOLVED]Dual boot Win7 and Arch problems with GRUB2!

#5 2015-08-23 13:16:36

Re: [SOLVED]Dual boot Win7 and Arch problems with GRUB2!

#6 2015-08-23 13:20:11

Re: [SOLVED]Dual boot Win7 and Arch problems with GRUB2!

#7 2015-08-23 13:24:42

Re: [SOLVED]Dual boot Win7 and Arch problems with GRUB2!

#8 2015-08-24 12:43:29

Re: [SOLVED]Dual boot Win7 and Arch problems with GRUB2!

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