Debian 6 with Windows 7
 

I know this has been asked and answered a million times before, but after 10+ attempts I can't get it working, despite following several guides to the letter. All the guides seem to suggest it 'just works, simple!'

I have 3 physical SATA hard drives; Disk 0 has 2 partitions, Win 7 and XP, disk 1 is completely blank ready to accept Debian and disk 2 is a data drive (NTFS).

I have used EasyBCD to set up a dual boot for Win 7 and XP. All works fine.

Downloaded Debian 6.0.6 iso1 and burnt it to DVD, booted PC with it to install Debian.

I used the 'use whole disk option' and separate partitions for everything, sticking to the assisted method rather than manual. The partitions all installed on sda.

When it came to installing Grub I went for sda1, NOT the Win 7 partition.

All seemed to go OK, the DVD ejected and I rebooted to Win 7. I then ran EasyBCD, followed the instructions to set up a Linux entry, and despite trying many different combinations of settings, nothing worked. If I examine the Debian drive from Win 7 using ext2explore everything seems to be in place, including the /boot/grub directory.

I booted from the Super Grub Disk and got to a grub prompt, but 'find /boot/grub/stage1' does not find the file. What does seem strange is that the Super Grub Disk installs the Debian disk to sdb (which seems more logical than sda that the Debian installer uses), but even trying to boot from that directly it just hangs, although ctrl-alt-del will reboot so it hasn't crashed.

This is the first time I have installed Linux on SATA; I am more used to IDE where you could jumper the drives to be sure what port of the controller they were connected to. I am sure I must be missing something really simple here, but I can't for the life of me work out what, and none of the questions I have found have my set-up; most refer to a single partitioned drive.

Please help!

It would help someone to help you if you posted your drive/partition information. Since you can't boot Debian, boot the Debian CD and open a terminal and type the following: sudo fdisk -l(Lower case Letter L in the command). Post the output here.

Debian has been using Grub2 for several releases and there is not stage1 file. You should have an option with supergrubdisk to use Grub2, if not you have the wrong Supergrubdisk.

If you were installing Debian on its own disk, you should have installed Grub to the mbr of the drive rather than a partition.


That a failure of EasyBCD which is windows software. Have you posted at the neosmart forums? Post the partition information above and while you are logged in to the Debian CD, go to the site below and download and run the bootinfoscript and post the output here, a results.txt file. This will give detailed information on your drives/partitions and boot files.

Just a suggestion, but how about using grub to boot linux or windows? Set the drive where you have installed Debian & grub (/dev/sda) as your primary boot device in BIOS.

I have in the past been able to get EasyBCD working to boot Ubuntu but is was painful. Grub was much easier. I currently have a dual booting setup with Win 7 & Debian Squeeze: each on a separate drive. I have installed grub on both drives. You can easily do install grub with any recent live cd. I can post the instructions to do this if the above step does not work.

Regards,
Stefan

Thanks, yancek, that was the problem.

I re-installed, this time entering '/dev/sda' instead of '/dev/sda1' for GRUB. I knew it would be something simple!