W7/Linux Mint dual boot upgade

Hello, I've included a screenshot of the logical arrangement of my Windows and Linux partitions. I'm using just one physical hard drive on this old computer where both Windows 7 and Linux Mint 9 are installed. I've color-coded the Windows and Linux areas. Notice the labels and attributes of each partition. Compare that with your situation.

And if you still have trouble booting from the CD, here's an option:

You wanna try out the new releases of Linux Mint 11 RC and Ubuntu 11.04, instead of burning their ISOs into a live CD that you wanna boot from, use Universal USB Installer instead. Its a free tool that has the ability to install your Linux distros into USB flashdrives which you can boot from to run or install the Linux OS. It also has the ability to create a custom-sized "persistent" file that would save any settings, preferences and data made and saved into a Linux OS running inside a USB flashdrive. This can then be used on any machine that can boot from a USB flashdrive, making the Linux OS portable. You can get it here:

Universal USB Installer – Easy as 1 2 3 | USB Pen Drive Linux

Hope this helps and good luck.

Vertex said:

severedsolo said:

That shouldn't matter John. If you use the one-time boot menu, then once all is set up, you can access the HDD's from either install, but the bootloaders are completely seperate.

Windows 7 cannot access the partitions where Linuxes are installed because Linux partitions typically use ext4 file systems that Windows cannot read so its wise to have a huge NTFS partition that both Linux and Windows can access.

Yes sorry I should have been clearer there, what I meant was that both installs can access the HDD, although they will only be readable if the OS recognises the file system