Hi there, first time poster here.

I am attempting to dual boot Windows HPC Server 2008 on my existing Linux(Ubuntu) HPC machine. I know that Windows will wipe the MBR and I have the Ubuntu LiveCD to restore GRUB when that happens, but I am having some trouble with my disk partitions.

As of right now, when I boot into the Windows installation, it shows no disks available to install onto. I ran 'diskpart' and it returned with "There are no fixed disks to show." I made sure to use GParted to partition the main (sda2) drive in half and format the unallocated space to an NTFS partition, yet Windows still refuses to see it!

I am at a loss, I have absolutely no clue why it is not recognized. The BIOS sees it, Ubuntu sees it, but Windows is standing blind. Any ideas?

If needed, I can take some pictures of the partitioned drives in the GParted GUI if that helps you visualize what's going on. Thanks a lot!

Hello, type in your shell (console)
fdisk -l
It will show your partitions.

After executing sudo fdisk -l, I receive this:

It only shows that 'device', sda1. In GParted, though, it shows sda1, sda2, sda3, and sda4(this one being the Windows partition).

Gparted is using gpt partitioning scheme, and windows can have problems with it.
Try to delete ntfs partition and leave it unallocated.
Run setup of windows server, it shall recognize this unallocated disk space.

As you said, at the end of installation, MBR shall be restored for linux.
This GUI tool is helpful and easy for ubuntu: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

I installed Microsoft Windows Vista first on my Hard Drive; then Debian and Xubuntu after. I read that Microsoft Windows Operating Systems need to be installed first before Linux Operating Systems. I had no problem doing this on two different hard drives one 250GB and my current 500GB one.

It was an easy install with Vista first; then the Linux installs went easily on without having to do anything extra.

There are other Operating Systems that need to be installed as first on the Hard Drive besides Microsoft Windows ones such as PC-BSD which I have installed before just trying it out as well as using it on virtualbox.

Hello, thanks for the great responses. I apologize for mine being so late.

Anyways, I tried using no partition and just leaving it as unallocated space and Windows still did not recognize any drives. Is there anything else I can try? Could there be some drivers that I need to load alongside the installation?

My drives currently look like this:

/dev/sda1 bios_grub
/dev/sda2 ext4
/dev/sda4 unallocated
/dev/sda3 linux-swap

I'd really like to avoid having to wipe Ubuntu and start with Windows as I have software on Ubuntu that was fairly difficult to set up.

Thank you!

Microsoft installs are known for checking that they have the only bootable partition.
I have not done Vista but I would guess that it sees the other partition bootable switches and that the bootable partition type is not one it wants to mess with.

On mine, I created a number of small partitions, then hid all of linux in a linux-extended partition, which was ignored by the Windows install.
I have 10 partitions on my drive with two small FREEDOS partitions at the lowest end, with windows as the third partition.

You could try the following.
Write down the exact sector addresses of all your linux partitions. You can always restore those later if this does not work. I had to restore mine at least 8 times (but I was fighting with getting windows to not clobber linux partitions). Windows got its disk parameters different from the way Linux gets them and they were enough different to get different partition locations. That could also be your problem, as Windows believes the BIOS.

Use some partition program to create two small partitions and a large one for vista, pushing linux stuff to an extended partition. Remove the bootable mark for all partitions that Vista could find.
Create the partition you want Vista to use as something older like Fat32, and make it bootable.
Let the Vista install "discover" the Fat32 bootable partition and let it upgrade it, and install to it.

Linux does not need the bootable flags in the MBR.
Restore any paritition settings that linux may need.

Hello,

I found that my system may not be using MBR, but instead GPT; I heard that this may cause some issues with Windows as it will likely only detect MBR partition tables.

According to this, though, Windows Server 2008 supports booting from GPT, but only on EFI firmware:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Pa...support_of_GPT

I fear that I may be using GPT, but with the normal BIOS without EFI which is disallowing Windows to see the partitions. Is there any way to check for the presence of EFI? Is there anyway around this barrier? I could be totally mistaken on this, but it seems relevant enough.

Thanks again.

RESOLVED:

I found that the HDD's were connected to an LSI RAID Controller which needed necessary drivers during the Windows install. I copied them to a flash drive and loaded them up during installation and Windows sees everything now!

Thanks for all the help and hopefully this can help others!