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randyvh 09-19-2015 09:05 PM

duel boot not working
 
Hellow
I am trying to duel boot ubuntu 14.04.3 and windows 8. At this point I may have made a shambles of my partitions. Ubuntu will boot but I get an error message while opening windows in grub "windows boot manager on /dev/sda1". Here are what my partitions look like.
part.#1 524 mb /dev/sda1 bios boot, part#2 42mb /dev/sda2 fat32 not mounted
part#3 134mb /dev/sda3 ms recovery, part#4 736mb /dev/sda4 ms recovery ntfs
part#5 385 gb /dev/sda5 basic data ntfs not mounted, part#6 9gb /dev/sda ms windows recovery ntfs not mounted, part#7 105 gb /dev/sda7 linux file system ext4 vertion1 mounted at file system root.Should I wipe out everything and just install ubuntu and then figure out how to install ms, or if I haven't screwed up to bad, is there a way to get ms to boot? sda1 was where ms boot loader was.

wpeckham 09-20-2015 06:44 AM

Windows and dual boot
 
First: Windows always tries to take over ALL boot control on install. Thus, to install dual boot you ALWAYS want to install Windows first.

Second: make sure that BOTH things you want to install will install properly and boot using your current BIOS settings. It is easy (now) to have two perfectly good operating systems that require different settings, rendering them unfit for dual boot. That USED to be impossible (than you Microsoft!).

Third: if you can, pre-partition your drive and get the first one (windows) to use the partitions you allocate for it, and NOT the ones you set aside for other operating systems. If Windows insists on taking up everything, you will be forced into shrinking the windows partition to free up space for your Linux partition. Easy, when it works: a real pain when it does not.

There are a gazillion (technical term for a larger number than I want to know about) how-to documents, wiki pages, and online tutorials for this process. Some of them are very good, some are seriously dated, some WERE good but are obsolete or apply only to certain hardware.
Look up a few, and focus on those specific to your version of Windows and linux distribution if you can.

You want grub to take over boot (on the raw disk MBA (/dev/sda ) so it can forward boot to the windows boot manager in the windows partition AND still serve the linux boot. When this works properly, you might see a message like that on install and updates, but not on every boot.

I hope that this helps.

yancek 09-20-2015 08:20 AM

Are you using UEFI to boot? A default windows 8 install will use UEFI, if you installed it yourself, then you would know whether you use it or not. If you did have windows using UEFI, you need to install Ubuntu in UEFI. Your partitions look a little bit odd. Usually in UEFI, there will be a 200-500MB partition for EFI files and it will be labelled so. Not sure what those other small partitions are unless you also created a BIOS boot partition. Not sure why you would have 3 partitions labelled Recovery. The only one that seems large enough to be an actual recovery partition is sda6 at 9GB.

Post more details. The best way to do that is to boot Ubuntu and go to the site below and get boot repair. Download and run it but select the option to CreateBootInfo Summary and do not try to do any repairs. If you post the output here or post a link to it, someone should be able to give you suggestions.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

randyvh 09-20-2015 10:03 AM

Thankyou both for your replies.
Yancek, I did as you suggested.
here is the info.
http://paste.ubuntu.com/12501878

yancek 09-20-2015 11:44 AM

You have Grub installed to the MBR of the drive pointing to sda7 where Ubuntu is with it's boot files so that boots. sda1 is the BIOS boot partition needed to boot using GPT which you are. I don't know what sda2, sda3 and sda4 are except that they are windows partitions. The only partition with windows boot files is sda5 which is a logical partition. Windows needs to have it's boot files on a primary. I don't use UEFI but from what I have read, if you are using GPT with windows, you need to use UEFI which you are not. There is not entry for windows in the grub.cfg file. I don't know is running: sudo update-grub from Ubuntu would help due to the UEFI/GPT thing as I don't use it. Wait for someone who uses UEFI/GPT and windows to post as I don't know how you would repair the problem.

randyvh 09-20-2015 01:02 PM

O.K. thanks.


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