Solved big mistake - installed Win 7 on a drive that already had linux on it

[xwray]

I have a system with hot swappable drives that normally runs win10. A while back I installed Mint on a second drive to see how I might like Linux. I decided that I would rather have win7 as a second OS so installed it from its original DVD mistakenly thinking it would format the entire drive prior to installing win7 but obviously it didn't.


After installing win7 I spent a lot of time installing all of the win7 updates such that win update reports win7 is completely up-to-date. I really don't want to go through that process again thus this post.


Since I didn't know what I was doing I did not do anything that would have given me a dual boot capability and am hoping someone here can tell me if it's possible to make the drive dual boot after the fact since it would appear that both Mint and win 7 are both working by virtue of the fact Mint now owns the boot process and the fact that the installation of win7 doesn't appear to have corrupted Mint and I was able to completely update win 7 after its initial installation. (I hope that made sense)


So, can I do that and if so how?


If I can't do that is it possible to tweak the boot record or delete Mint from the drive and fix it so win7 will boot properly.


Any help will be most appreciated.

 

[Megahertz07]

If you installed win 7 on a different partition, yes it's possible

Is your disk a Legacy - MBR or UEFI - GPT?

Please post a Disk manager image of your disk.
Open Disk Manager (C:\Windows\System32\diskmgmt.msc), expand the window and the columns so we can read them and with the Snipping tool take a snapshot of the whole window and save it to your disk. Post it here as an attachment (use the paper clip on Quick Reply the top row. Browse to the saved file - upload

 

[xwray]

Disk is legacy MBR.


Windows disk manager doesn't want to show any info the the linux/win7 drive other than it's "there"...File Explorer doesn't even see it. Since I can't get to win 7 I booted to win10 and started disk mgr which did show disk 1 which is the joint linux/win 7 disk.

 

[xwray]

added picture

 

[Megahertz07]

From Win 10 post a Disk manager image of your linux/win7 drive.

Please:
Open Disk Manager (C:\Windows\System32\diskmgmt.msc), expand the window and the columns so we can read them.
Take a snapshot of the whole window

 

[xwray]

 

[Megahertz07]

There is nothing on disk 1 (100% free) despite it is set as Active. And there is no Linux partition in any disk.
As you have a hot swap able drives, are you sure you inserted the right disk?

 

[Bree]

There is nothing on disk 1 (100% free) despite it is set as Active. And there is no Linux partition in any disk.

Wouldn't the Linux partition be EXT4 format, and therefore unreadable by Windows?

ext4 - Wikipedia

So isn't the Active partition on disk 1 almost certainly the Linux partition?

 

[xwray]

Based on my extremely limited experience I believe that to be correct. The only thing I know for sure is that if I plug disk 1 into the boot drive (normal C: drive) slot Mint boots rather than win10 (as it should).

So, back to the original question...How do I turn disk 1 into a dual boot drive assuming that's possible?
Here is an image of a Mint screen:

 

[Snick]

xwray

Linux has built-in support for Windows NTFS partitions, but Windows can’t read Linux partitions without third-party software.
3 Ways to Access Your Linux Partitions From Windows
Here's an old video on dual boot. Grub on Linux partition which I recommend.
How to Dual Boot Windows and Linux. ( The Nontraditional way

Bill

 

[Megahertz07]

My mistake, disk 1 has a Linux partition. But where is win 7 partition?
On the image below, you can see my dual boot (Win 7 and Linux) on disk 3

Download and install MiniTool Partition 11
With mini tool you can see the ext4 Linux partition and Linux swap.

Are you sure you have installed Win 7 on same disk with Mint?

 

[xwray]

Gents...thanks for all your help and suggestions. It's becoming obvious I'm mis-remembering something and rather than wasting more time chasing down what seems to be a non-problem am taking a different path.


Since all I was really trying to accomplish was to have a completely updated Win7 OS available after MS win7 support terminates I decided to put an old retired XP Thinkpad to use and installed win7 on it which worked out great...runs much faster than it ever did, actually quite usable now.



thanks again

 

[Snick]

Hi xwray,
If your issue is resolved, please mark your thread as such.
Happy Computing!