Dual-Booting Linux/Windows 7/Windows 2000 - two gotchas (OT for uk.tech.digital-tv)

On Thu, 21 Jan 2016 15:40:55 -0800, mike wrote:

What happens when you put both windows installations on disk 1?

There are reasons why I don't want to do that.

Use BCDedit to manage the linux boots.

It will corrupt the W2k partition by installing itself there.

Or use the BIOS boot capabilities to select what boots.

I have to remember to press the right key at the right time - that's
alright for occasional need, but a bore compared with grub remembering
the previously chosen option and booting that after a short timeout.

Both options prevent GRUB from fscking everything up.

It's not grub that's f*cking up, it's Microsoft's boot load mechanism,
which has 'previous'. It's a long-standing 'feature', as Microsoft
would have us believe, aka 'bug' by the rest of the world, whereby the
Windows boot system doesn't take account of the disk and partition
it's loaded from.

One of its earlier manifestations was that a Microsoft MBR loaded off
a second or subsequent hard disk didn't look on THAT hard disk's
partition table for an active, bootable partition, but the partition
table on the FIRST hard disk. However, although a nuisance, this was
fixable by replacing the Microsoft MBR with an alternative MBR, say
using lilo.

Similarly, in order to multi-boot versions of Windows that included 9x
and NTx (including 2k and XP), you had to install NTx boot files in
whatever partition was flagged 'active' - that is, except in very
unusual circumstances, the partition that is booted from, which is not
necessarily the same as the one containing NTx - so you'd end up
with NTLDR and boot.ini corrupting the 9x partition.

Similarly, when you installed the 2k/XP recovery console, it installed
to the currently active partition not the partition containing NTx.
Thus, in a dual-boot system, you could end up with the 2k/XP recovery
console on a W98 partition, though, as we've seen in my OP, I was able
to turn that bug to my advantage by using it to get the RC to install
to my Emergency USB stick!

Now it seems bootmgr.exe does the same sort of thing. No matter what
hard disk and partition it was run from, it appears to look blindly
for /Boot/BCD in the active partition on the first hard disk, which in
my particular case is that containing 2k. If I were to run an
automated boot fix from the W7 DVD, it wouldn't fix bootmgr to load
/Boot/BCD from its own partition on HD2, but corrupt the W2k partition
by installing another copy of bootmgr and BCD there.

What should be happening in all these situations is that the boot
mechanism for each OS should reside in the same partition as the OS
itself, and should launch only that OS, and that the multi-boot
mechanism should be agnostic as to what OSs are actually installed.

The Slackware distribution used to include the files for an SBootMgr
floppy, which searched for partitions on hard disks, and offered a
menu to choose which one to try to boot. Although I don't think it
has been actively supported for a while, IMV this was the right
approach to multi-booting, though obviously one wants such a mechanism
on one of the HDs, not a floppy. Unfortunately however, the above
history of Microsoft bugs means that it doesn't really work too well
with Windows partitions, and that is probably why support for it seems
to have been discontinued some while ago now.
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On 1/22/2016 2:07 AM, Java Jive wrote:


What should be happening in all these situations is that the boot
mechanism for each OS should reside in the same partition as the OS
itself, and should launch only that OS, and that the multi-boot
mechanism should be agnostic as to what OSs are actually installed.

The Slackware distribution used to include the files for an SBootMgr
floppy, which searched for partitions on hard disks, and offered a
menu to choose which one to try to boot. Although I don't think it
has been actively supported for a while, IMV this was the right
approach to multi-booting, though obviously one wants such a mechanism
on one of the HDs, not a floppy. Unfortunately however, the above
history of Microsoft bugs means that it doesn't really work too well
with Windows partitions, and that is probably why support for it seems
to have been discontinued some while ago now.

I once used PLOP boot manager from a floppy.
It was a headless system, so I had to boot a different floppy
for each OS.

You can run PLOP of the MacPup live thumb drive preboot menu.

Finally gave up on all that and quit trying to dual-boot.
Plugin hard drives don't take any longer than a reboot.

On 19/01/2016 21:48, Java Jive wrote:
OT for uk.tech.digital-tv, but cross-posting there as recently there
have been a couple of related threads there ...

I have the following arrangement:
Disk 1:
P1: NTFS Windows 2000 (bootable)
P2: NTFS Data
P3: ext4 Ubuntu 14 /
P4: ext4 Ubuntu 14 /home
Disk 2:
P1: NTFS Windows 7 (bootable)

snip

Gotcha #1:

Windows 2000 hibernates correctly, but Windows 7 won't hibernate, it
turns out it's because it's installed on the second hard disk.

I confess to speaking from a position of complete ignorance, but I
wonder if putting Windows 7 on Disk 1 and Ubuntu on Disk 2 solve your
problem?

(If there are practical reasons why this is not possible, just ignore
me. As I said, I am ignorant. Sometimes though, an ignorant person can
ask the question that would not occur to the people trying to find a
solution to the problem as defined.)

Jim

On Sat, 23 Jan 2016 15:00:07 +0000, Indy Jess John wrote:

I confess to speaking from a position of complete ignorance, but I
wonder if putting Windows 7 on Disk 1 and Ubuntu on Disk 2 solve your
problem?

I did that using grub on an ancient box running Win95 and Fedora 2. It
worked without any problems, until the win95 disk died.


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[email protected] | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

On Sat, 23 Jan 2016 15:00:07 +0000, Indy Jess John
wrote:

I confess to speaking from a position of complete ignorance, but I
wonder if putting Windows 7 on Disk 1 and Ubuntu on Disk 2 solve your
problem?

Yes, it would, but there are other reasons why I don't want to do
this.
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