How to dual boot with windows vista?

EvoL1 · #1 19th September 2007, 09:20 AM

Can someone point me into the right direction because I am bout to purchase a laptop that will come with windows vista most likely and want to read up on how to dual boot with it. I have found a couple tuts but still want to look around. I also will have vista previously installed.
thanks in advance.

-EvoL1

***glennzo*** · #2 19th September 2007, 10:00 AM

I bought a laptop recently and installed Fedora on it after about a week of ownership. I used Windows' own Disk Management tool to shrink the disk and create a 20GB partition and a 2GB partition. Then I installed Fedora 7. I told the installer to format the 20GB partition to EXT3 and the 2GB to SWAP. Install setup the boot loader and here I am. Couldn't have been any easier. When the Fedora install was complete I had a dual boot system. Since then I've added another EXT3 part and I now boot Fedora 7, Fedora 8 Test and Vista.

toxicshock · #3 22nd September 2007, 09:03 PM

Greetings,

I am curious whether you loaded the Vista or grub boot loader into the MBR. If not, how did you do it?

I am trying to get a dual boot setup on a HP dv6405ca laptop.

pparks1 · #4 22nd September 2007, 09:23 PM

Generally speaking, you want to load Windows first, leaving enough unallocated partition space to install Linux.

when Linux installs, it will install the grub boot loader which will recognize the Windows partition and leave you an entry to boot into Windows if you choose to do so.

When you load Windows after Linux, Windows just overwrites the master boot record and does not taken into account the possibility of having another OS...so you won't get a choice to boot into Linux.

***glennzo*** · #5 22nd September 2007, 10:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by toxicshock

Greetings,

I am curious whether you loaded the Vista or grub boot loader into the MBR. If not, how did you do it?

I am trying to get a dual boot setup on a HP dv6405ca laptop.

I left Vista installed as it was when I took the laptop out of the box. Did a little investigating and found that Windows' own Disk Management tools would be just what I needed to shrink the 160GB disk, leaving Vista untouched and creating 2 EXT3 and 1 swap partition. Worked like a charm and I'm happily booting Vista, Fedora 7 and the 'distro of the week', Ubuntu 7.04 something or other. Fedora took care of the boot loader and away we go!

toxicshock · #6 23rd September 2007, 04:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by glennzo

I left Vista installed as it was when I took the laptop out of the box. Did a little investigating and found that Windows' own Disk Management tools would be just what I needed to shrink the 160GB disk, leaving Vista untouched and creating 2 EXT3 and 1 swap partition. Worked like a charm and I'm happily booting Vista, Fedora 7 and the 'distro of the week', Ubuntu 7.04 something or other. Fedora took care of the boot loader and away we go!

It's good to hear that there are some successes out there. In my case, I recently purchased a HP DV6405ca and done the same thing as noted above. I tried to use the GRUB bootloader in the MBR and in the boot partition without success. I then tried using EasyBCD without success either.
The odd thing I have noticed is that when I initially install F7 I can boot it with no problem. However, once I do an update to an new kernel, the boot fails before the welcome screen.
At this point, I am stuck researching the problem.

***glennzo*** · #7 23rd September 2007, 04:50 PM

To be truthful, I don't know where my grub boot loader is installed. I just let Fedora do it's thing. Anyone want to clue me in on this? Is it on/in the MBR ? Whatever it is its the default.

osprey · #8 24th September 2007, 04:22 PM

Question:

I have a machine that i use mostly just linux but I do have it dual boot with XP. I want to change it so the linux on it stays in tact but overwrite the windows with a fresh vista install.

(Roughly the same as installing windows AFTER linux instead of before). Can someone tell me how to do so?

Thanks.

toxicshock · #9 26th September 2007, 08:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by osprey

Question:

I have a machine that i use mostly just linux but I do have it dual boot with XP. I want to change it so the linux on it stays in tact but overwrite the windows with a fresh vista install.

(Roughly the same as installing windows AFTER linux instead of before). Can someone tell me how to do so?

Thanks.

Greetings Osprey,

I used the following guide to figure out how-to get dual booting to work with vista:

http://apcmag.com/node/5162/

Hope that helps.

toxicshock · #10 26th September 2007, 09:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by glennzo

To be truthful, I don't know where my grub boot loader is installed. I just let Fedora do it's thing. Anyone want to clue me in on this? Is it on/in the MBR ? Whatever it is its the default.

Greetings Glenzo,

If it was the default, then you got lucky and it installed into the MBR.

I finally got the laptop to dual boot F7 and vista. Here is my checklist:

1 - Boot into vista and use the Disk Management Tool to shrink the partition to fit F7. I deleted the restore partition too.

2 - Install F7 and do the first time configuration.

3 - Boot with Gparted or System Rescue CD and change the F7 boot partition flag to make it (/dev/sda2) the boot partition instead of the vista partition (/dev/sda1).

4 - Boot into vista and wait for it to boot. This is very important since it took about 10 minutes on my laptop. If you're lucky, it should boot fine. In my case, it came up with a BSD (Black screen of death) and I had to reboot it so that a chkdsk could be done. Once the chkdsk is done, it will reboot again.

5 - I checked to see if both OS's would boot up via GRUB on the F7 partition. Once that was done. I was able to start my migration from the old laptop.

On another topic, the only things not working are the wireless and usb stick mount (surprise, surprise).

osprey · #11 27th September 2007, 01:41 AM

I figured out how to do this. It was actually quite easy.

What I did was this:
1. Installed WindowsXP on a system with a singel sata drive. I created a partition half the size of the drive as C: (40GB)
2. I then installed Fedora7 in the unused partition (40GB)
3. During the install I installed GRUB as the bootloader
4. After this /boot/grub/grub.conf looked like this:

default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora(2.6.22.5-76.fc7)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz...........<snip>
initrd /init....................<snip>
title WindowsXP_SP2
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

5. I unplugged the SATA drive and plugged in a new SATA drive and installed Vista
6. I then made sure BOTH SATA drives were plugged in, the Vista on the Second port (Important)
7. Then I booted up into linux and changed /boot/grub/grub.conf to look like this:

default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora(2.6.22.5-76.fc7)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz...........<snip>
initrd /init....................<snip>
title WindowsXP_SP2
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
title Windows_Vista
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
I then booted into all three OS's and verified that all booted normally.

That's It!

I now have a single PC that does XP for Windows based gaming, Vista for whatever reason, and Linux when I want to do real work or OpenGL based gaming.

toxicshock · #12 27th September 2007, 01:45 AM

Greetings Osprey,

It's good to hear that you got things worked out. Onto the next challenge!

osprey · #13 27th September 2007, 01:48 AM

BTW
Hard drives are CHEAP nowdays, so the cost of a second 80GB sata drive was WAY cheaper than the time, risk, and headache of having to overwrite mbr's and the like. It woulda been cool to put all 3 on one, but I am happy with the outcome. I think the best would to be to do vista 1st then XP then Linux last, but that's just my opinion. I already had the dualboot XP/Linux so I had to add Vista (which I hate but need to learn :P )

kevmif · #14 27th September 2007, 02:43 AM

Acer Aspire 5100 with Vista home premium.

Installed Fedora 8 - had all sorts of kernel issues thanks to the turion platform, but absolutely no issues with grub. It picked up the Vista partition no worries and I can boot to both without issue.

Techokami · #15 27th September 2007, 09:19 PM

Hmmm, I'm having similar, yet different problems. See, unlike you guys, I'm using a separate disk for Vista. However, Vista can't write to the MBR on the primary disk, because it's ext3 and not on the disk Vista is moving into.

How do I go about letting Vista overwrite the MBR, without having to reinstall/heavily reconfigure Fedora?