Sorry for double posting but I still need help :-(
So here is a *push* to hopefully gain some attention ;-)

Hi:

After reading through the boot info. script that you posted I see that all of your Windows partitions are on sda on your first hard disk drive that the system see's.

Your second drive has multiple partitions and 3 different distro's (Ubuntu, Mageia and Debian) and only one swap partition.
How your Windows partition made it onto your second drive is unknown to me.
I would leave that partition alone.

If this were my machine I would start all over again and before installing any distribution I would open the tower and unplug the 1 TB drive so that there is no confusion as to which drive to install to.


With your second drive being a 250 GB HDD I wouldn't install more than 2 distributions.
I'm not sure if triple booting is wise with a HDD of that size.

Install one distribution at a time making a 'ext 4' journaling file system and a 1 GB linux-swap partition.

I had a linuxmint install list itself atleast 4x, but I also had debian on the drive. My main OS is always debian so I just booted to debian & reinstalled grub, which fixed that problem.

As far as windows not being detected, I mount the wins partition & run update-grub.

I guess that would depend more upon what the OP uses them for. I have a 320GB drive with 6 Linux distributions plus windows 7.

I'm not sure what the question is. Are you looking still for suggestions on how to partition? If you are going to installing windows 8 you will need to familiarize yourself with GPT and EFI. I don't think you have to use EFI, but if you install multiple systems I believe they all need to be EFI or MBR, mixing creates problems. Another thing you might consider is a separate data partition in addition to the filesystem partition for each distribution. That way you would easily have access to the partition from any other OS and if you formatted it ntfs, you could also access it from windows.

Hi there, thanks for the replies!

My goal is to create a Linux HDD with one home (which is sdb7) and one swap (sdb6) partition, with every distro using these.
On sda only Win8 is installed and I don't want to change that.

My problems are:

- GRUB going nuts with all those mageia menu items
- I can't boot into mageia
- a GRUB installation which I can't use. It seems it is installed on sda because it loads up when booting from sda (I want to get rid of this installation)

I hope I could clear things up a little

Looking at the boot information script it shows that your sda 1 TB HDD has Grub installed as the bootloader for all of your Windows partitions.
Do you want to get rid of Grub?

Boot loader Grub: how to repair, adapt or remove it
https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/grub

Did you change or modify the Mageia partition?

Thanks for pointing me to this how to. But I'm afraid of deleting both GRUB installations, but I want to keep the one on sdb.
How do I chose which MBR is repaired when using my Win8 dvd?

I didn't change anything on the Mageia partition. I installed from a live session and then was never able to boot into Mageia from sdb.

@ EDDI1: I'm sorry I didn't answer to you. Win8 is being detected by both GRUB installations, but I can't boot into Windows when using sda as primary boot option.

Windows 8: fix the MBR-
https://neosmart.net/wiki/fix-mbr/#F...R_in_Windows_8

After you installed Mageia did your pc boot to a black screen?