Win 7 ultimate clean install on new computer w/2 WD 1TB HDD

jasco999 · 01 Nov 2010

I am planning to install linux ubuntu V.10.10 on the second drive but I see that during the clean install of win 7 it reserved 100mb on drive 0 and left the rest of that drive unformatted and put everything else on drive 1 which is now the "c" drive. Perhaps I should have left one drive unconnected during install process. Additionally, windows rates my system 5.9 due to hard drive disk performance- are there special settings for WD caviar Black drives w/64meg cache that should operate at 6mb/sec or is that the foreseeable performance rating for those drives? All of the other performance ratings are above 7. Thanks for any help.

Bare Foot Kid · 01 Nov 2010

Hello jasco999, welcome to Seven Forums!

As you say, multi booting Windows and Linux is best done on separate Hard Disk Drives (HDD) have a look at the info below to see the best way to go about it and be sure to post back with any further questions you may have and to keep us informed.

Information

The easiest way to do away with boot issues between separate Operating Systems (OS) is to use the BIOS one time boot menu to select which OS to boot at system startup, each motherboard has an individual hot-key to tap during system start-up to access this menu.

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

Just be sure not to change where the original HDD SATA cable was connected, it has to be re-connected to the exact same port to avoid boot issues.

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

Then set the BIOS to boot the HDD / OS you want as default and if you want to start the other (new) OS you use the BIOS one-time boot menu to select that HDD / OS to start when the PC is started.

Night Hawk · 02 Nov 2010

Hello jasco999 Welcome to the Seven Forums!

You may not be inclined to continue pressing an F key if that option is available for selecting which drive you will want to boot into and still want the 7 HD set as the default boot device. How to Dual Boot Windows 7 and Linux using BCDEdit

September 16th, 2009 by iceflatline

(6.30.10 – This post has been amended to address changes in recent versions of Fedora, GParted and Ubuntu — iceflatline)

This post will describe how to set up a system that can boot into Windows 7 or a Linux distribution. The Window 7 Boot Configuration Data Editor (BCDEdit) will be used to configure Windows 7 to display a menu at boot time that will allow the user to choose between Windows 7 and a Linux distribution of their choice. The steps described in this post assume that Windows 7 and the Linux distribution will occupy the same physical hard drive. Configuring BCDEdit to recognize and boot a Linux distribution located on a second physical hard drive is beyond the scope of this post.

To help explain the steps involved, we’ll use an 80 GB PATA hard drive with Windows 7 already installed. We’ll then re-partition the drive using Gnome Partition Editor (GParted) in order to add Ubuntu or Fedora. We’ll then use BCDedit to add a Windows boot menu option for our Linux distribution. All steps involved assume you have a functioning CD drive (or USB drive if you’d prefer) that the system can boot from. The software versions used in this post were as follows:

Fedora v13
GParted v0.5.2-9
Ubuntu v10.04 LTS
Windows 7 Professional (64-bit)

Oh… and while I’ve never encountered a situation where GParted destroyed existing disk data, make sure you backup any critical files before you proceed.

Sound advice before beginning for part of the guide seen there. Another alternative is the use of the free program EasyBCD which includes a form of NeoGrub to replace the default Grub loader and can be set up without trashing the Windows mbr. Wubi will work as well but you will want to point the Grub installer at the drive ubuntu will be on seeing that made the mount point "/".

From there you can add the new entry into the 7 BCD store using the "Grub isn't installed in bootsector" option to simply load the distro when selected from the 7 boot options.

As for the 6.0Gb/s transfer rate that is seen under ideal conditions being the maximum transfer rate not the constant rate. The 100mb system reserved partition is created when using the 7 installer's drive tools during the installation on a drive found "raw" being not having been previously partitioned and formatted. If you had previous seen to that with GParted for example you would simply end up with the single large C primary.

The image attached here shows a two OS drives with a temp install of 7 on the second without the 100mb present having already been previously partitioned and formatted for use. GParted live saw to that. For Sata III drives the options for prepartioning and formatting ahead can be performed with the drive tools on the 7 dvd or with GParted since other programs may not be able to see any Sata III drives.