Losing Vista, Dual boot W7 and Linux on seperate drives. Help Sought.

gregrocker · 18 Sep 2010

Mark Win7 partition Active, unplug Vista HD and swap its cable to Win7 making sure it remains first to boot in BIOS setup (after DVD drive). Unplug the backup drive or mark it Inactive or it will interfere: Partition - Mark as Active

Boot Win7 DVD Repair console or Repair CD, click through to Recovery Tools list to run Startup repair up to 3 separate times with reboots to write the System MBR to Win7 partition and make it boot independently.

Next, plug back in Vista HD, boot DVD again to wipe the HD using Diskpart, or use free Partition Wizard bootable CD to wipe only the Vista partition. Install Linux with Win7 HD unplugged. SSD - HDD Optimize for Windows Reinstallation
Partition Wizard

Boot preferred HD by setting it first HD to boot in BIOS setup. Boot other HD using one-time BIOS Boot Menu key whch on Giga boards is usually F12. This keeps the HD's independent to come and go as you please, and won't allow GRUB to corrupt Win7 boot as it frequently does.

Those Linux partitions you deleted needed to be wiped if they had GRUB or they might interfere with Win7 recovering System MBR - try it to see.

johnwillyums · 18 Sep 2010

Well. I was a bit concerned when I actually clicked the install button, convinced that I'd chosen the wrong drive and was about to wipe my install plus all my pics and media.
Fortunately I seem to have chosen correctly. I'm sat in Linux now. I've got my W7 drive mounted and I'm playing tunes and typing this. Just need to partition this drive and make some backup space.
I'm going to mainly use 7 and this is for fun but more as a safety measure in case I screw up W7.
So-MTI and BFK- Thank you both for your invaluable help and support.

Cheers, John

madtownidiot · 18 Sep 2010

good to hear it.. sry I had to drop out for a while... kids acting up

johnwillyums · 19 Sep 2010

Just thought I'd post a pic of my new Disk Management structure. The Linux install is on the beginning and end of Disk 0.
As you can see I've partioned most of the drive for back up and storage.
Greg. Unfortunately I have ended up with a GRUB choice that then takes me to the Windows loader. Seems to work ok at the moment. Thanks for your post, John:)

Bare Foot Kid · 19 Sep 2010

Hello John,

Glad to see you got it all sorted and running and thanks for the update.

gregrocker · 19 Sep 2010

You can use free Partition Wizard bootable CD to delete the free space mess at the end of DISK0. There appears to be a primary sliver partition in the middle of it. Just delete all three and create a new data partition there, formatted Logical I would suggest.

madtownidiot · 19 Sep 2010

gregrocker said:

You can use free Partition Wizard bootable CD to delete the free space mess at the end of DISK0. There appears to be a primary sliver partition in the middle of it. Just delete all three and create a new data partition there, formatted Logical I would suggest.

Disk 0 is where the OP installed linux, I don't think he really wants to do that.

johnwillyums · 20 Sep 2010

Thanks for your continuing support guys. I think you're referring to the mess at the end of Disk 2.
Disk 0 is a 500GB backup drive, Disk 1 is all Windows 7 and Disk 2 has the Linux Mint install at the front end followed by a large data partition then two Free Space Partitions at the end (20MB and 17GB)
I'll enclose a snip.
These were originally the Linux swap partition. I'm not sure how I've done this but I used GParted to create the NTFS storage partition (885GB) as Partition Wizard wouldn't let me and I seem to have ended up with these 2 and I'm not sure whether Linux swap is still in there.
What would you recommend?

Also I have another issue. When I open EasyBCD I get this (see snip) and if I carry on I find no boot entries in EasyBCD (see snip)
It suggests I manually load a BCD registry and if I click yes opens my documents.
I'm assuming this is to do with the messy GRUB which I have to go through to get to W7, but I'm unsure how to proceed.

Thanks again, John:)

madtownidiot · 20 Sep 2010

hello again:
if it's booting okay, don't mess it up with easyBCD.. there are many ways to clean up GRUB, and even set windows 7 as the default OS choice. I found this tutorial to be very helpful.

Also, windows doesn't recognize ext or swapfile file systems (or any other file systems not used by windows for that matter), so there aren't any partition utilities or boot configuration utilities that work from inside windows that won't render your system unbootable.

if you're absolutely determined to get rid of GRUB, you'll have to erase your linux install first and run a windows startup repair to get windows to boot, and while I'm sure someone here would know another way do dual boot windows and linux. I don't.. other than by removing other HDDs during OS installs and then using the one time boot menu to choose between HDDs at each start up

Bare Foot Kid · 20 Sep 2010

Bare Foot Kid said:

The easiest way to do away with boot issues between Windows and Linux is to use the BIOS one time boot menu to select which OS to boot at system startup.

If you have 2 separate Hard Disk Drives (HDD) and have one or the other installed to one HDD and you want to install the other; disconnect the HDD with the first OS installed on it and leave the HDD you want to install the second OS to connected.

Install the OS to the connected HDD and when complete and the system is booting good, power down and reconnect the second HDD with the first OS on it.

This way the OSs will boot independently of each other and there will be no boot conflicts between the 2 separate OSs to have to sort later.

If I remember correctly the hot-key for the one time boot menu for a Gigabyte mobo is F13 at boot.

Hello again John, I posted this back at post #20.

If you want to remove these 3 partitions, as the 2 extendeds are free space and the primary is only 1MB it would seem you have nothing there and you could remove them to recover the space back into the E: partition.

Windows disk management will do that all on its own, the extendeds have to be deleted in disk management again so they will be made unallocated space, then delete the little 1MB primary and you should have a block of unallocated space that E: can be extended into.