Multibooting with mint4win, and Wubi?

[flyboytim]

I have a desktop that happily multiboots Windows XP, 7, 8CP, and Ubuntu via WUBI.

If I were to choose to boot thru GRUB into the Windows bootloader, I would have difficulties each time a Windows version needs a repair or reinstallation, but WUBI seems to be fine so far.

I thought I would install Mint on the system too, using Mint4Win.

Mint4Win seems to want to uninstall Ubuntu. Is there any way to install Mint alongside Ubuntu, without installing to a new partition in the standard way?

[xenopeek]

Curious, which bootloader do you use now? Wubi also installs GRUB by default.

[flyboytim]

Hi Vincent - the bootloader is Windows 7.

At least, I think it is, I have used EasyBCD for boot editing, and I know it has its own bootloaders, such as neogrub.

The order of installation was XP, Windows 7 - but using imagex to apply the image from the Windows 7 install.wim, and then bcdboot from WinPE to write the BCD boot store. I used the same technique to install Windows 8 CP - it avoids the awful Windows 8 bootloader and multiple reboots when using an OS other than Windows 8.

Later I installed Ubuntu from within windows, but strangely, the installation failed from both XP and from Windows 7 - only when I tried Windows 8 to install Wubi did the installation complete successfully.

Again in Windows 8, I launched Mint4win, and the first dialog said that it was about to uninstall Ubuntu - so I cancelled it.

[xenopeek]

Yes, the installer mint4win and wubi both enforce that only one of these is installed (so also just one mint4win; you can't in a normal way install multiple Linux Mint versions with mint4win). Somebody over at the Ubuntu Forums has a workaround, but I'm not sure this will still work. In any case, before your attempt it back up any important personal files: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1591825

[flyboytim]

Thanks Vincent - that is the approach I was thinking of taking - renaming the ubuntu root drectory, installing mint4win, and then editing the new mint grub.cfg menu to load ubuntu as well. I'll give it a go!