Dual-boot laptop: how to preserve recovery partition
 

Hello,

I have Acer Travelmate 5720, which has "Recovery partitin" and Windows 10 (but, unfortunately, 32 Bit only). I would like to install "Suse" in 64 Bit to use RAM completely. But I'm afraid of destroying "Recovery partition". What would be a best place for a boot manager / GRUB in this case?

I personally think, it should not be placed on the drive itself, but rather on the Linux partition. This would preserve the location of "Recovery partition" and its "bootability". But I would be glad to hear other opinions.

Regards from Germany,
Andrey

Not sure what you mean by this, unless there are two drives in the system. Normally, the way to go is to shrink windows with windows disk manager, install linux to the empty space on the drive and let the installer install grub to mbr to allow dual booting with windows.

from windows run msinfo32.exe and post the bios mode of windows and post a screenshot of disk-management disk layout.

This is legacy boot, right? In this case just back up the boot sector with dd. Because installing Grub in legacy mode will overwrite it. Restoring the boot sector from this backup will restore your Windows boot. If you install Grub on partition then you have to chainload it by Windows bootloader (I don't know how to do that).

I'm not clear about your question. If you plan to dual boot with windows 10, there is no reason the OpenSuse install would overwrite the recovery partition and not the other partitions unless you as the user installing, tell it to. As pointed out above, if you have a Legacy install, you need either boot code for windows in the MBR or boot code for Linux (Grub) in the MBR. If you put Grub on the partition you install OpenSuse to, you will need to boot it from windows which is quite a convoluted process. Do you not have a Recovery CD/USB for windows?

If you are wanting to keep windows boot code in mbr and linux grub code in linux partition there is grub4dos/wingrub that allows booting linux from windows bootloader:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/grub4dos/

Hello,

actually, my idea was to preserve "bootability" of recovery partition after installing "open Suse" (and keeping Windows 10). So, I wanted to know where I should place GRUB boot loader to achieve my goal.

But situation has changed: I started recovery option of laptop (just to test that it works) and now I cannot start Windows 10 anymore. I suppose, recovery process has overwritten the MBR already - even without recoverying anything.

Even if I "lost" Windows 10, the question remains. Thanks for all your hints.

Regards from hamburg

Hello,
this is very clear explanation. Either I put Grub into MBR, or I place Grub into Linux partition, but then I must make Grub "reachable" from Windows.

As far as I remember, GRUB "sees" recovery partitions and puts them into list of boot options. Perhaps, I will try to install GRUB and then just use recovery partition from there, if needed.

regards,
A.

Some users never cease amazing me. Making a copy of boot sector takes what, 20 seconds, maybe 30 if you are slow. You could store this tiny file in your Windows recovery partition where it will be handy when you need it. Instead we have here a day long discussion about something. Wouldn't life be easier if we keep simple things simple? :rolleyes: (Don't answer that.)

Making a copy of the boot sector would seem to be the simplest option.

That seems strange. In the past, I have created a windows recovery usb and booted it to test and not selected any option and had no problem later booting either Linux or windows. Did you select any option to start recovery? If you can't now boot windows, your boot sector may have been corrupted.

If you are using a Legacy system, you might try getting EasyBCD to fix or reinstall the boot code. See the link below.
Apparently you will need to register at their site to get the free version which was not necessary in the past.

https://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

How did you start the recovery option? Did you select it from the Grub Menu or with a windows recovery cd/usb?
Grub4Dps apparently would do the same, I've never used it myself so??

As mentioned above, the simplest way to do this would have been to shrink your largest windows partition with the Disk Management tool in windows to create unallocated or free space and install OpenSuse there. It would not overwrite the windows partitions unless the user makes an incorrect selection during the install. Before doing this, you should have created a windows recovery cd/usb.