Michael McCourt : mccomic@mcs.anl.gov (or mccomic@iit.edu)
Office : E1 105d
Office Hours : MW 10:00-1:00, TR 2:00-5:00
Dual Booting Ubuntu and Windows 7
For those of you interested, there may be a bug because of the the new bootloader structures in Windows 7 and Ubuntu using GRUB2.
If you come across an issue, use the following to fix it:
Fixing the Windows 7 Bootloader
If you are having issues not being able to boot into Windows, pop in your recovery CD and, after you select your Regional settings, click on "Repair
your computer". If you don't have a recovery CD, check out This Website to
snag one.
On the next page, make sure you deselect your Windows installation, if it is automatically selected (just click on it). Then click next and choose
the "Command Prompt" option. Form the command prompt type in
bootrec.exe /fixboot
bootrec.exe /fixmbr
You should be able to restart successfully now, although probably only into Windows as this will likely kill your GRUB.
Fixing the Ubuntu GRUB Bootloader
If you need to fix your GRUB bootloader, it will require a little more work. First you need your Ubuntu CD, any of them should be fine. Pop it in
and boot up a Live CD session.
Once you're inside your Live session, you need to mount your Ubuntu installation. To do that you should click on Places in the start bar and then
select whichever partition is your UNIX partition. That will mount your hard drive.
Check that it worked correctly with
mount | tail -1
The address that has /media followed by a long hex number is your partition address. It may look like /media/0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444. Now execute the command
sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444 /dev/sda --recheck
You should be good to go now.
Dell Issues
If you have a new Dell Inspiron, there is a chance that the "Dell DataSafe Local Backup" will kill your bootloader structure. If that happens,
uninstall it and the Online Backup.
Relevant References
These are the sites where I found this info. I only copied it here in case these websites changed the addresses. I've had to do this way too many
times and I finally decided to record what I did.