LMDE 201403 forces GRUB installation

[Talegolas]

All,

I had a laptop with Windows 7 and Linus Mint Nadia as dual boot. The boot loader was Windows as the partition is encrypted and GRUB wouldn't be able to boot it up (or even find it for that matter).

Well, Nadia's support was about to expire so I decided to try LMDE as it would never ask me to do an upgrade like the ubuntu versions require. I downloaded the LMDE 201403 boot it up, installed it and went through the process. When reaching the partition selection I was able to see the NTFS partition for windows, and reused the old Nadia partition for LMDE, then the screen where I either select or de-select the GRUB installation came up. By default, GRUB Installation checkbox is checked.. so I cleared it as I don't want it.. I finalized the installation and it was time to reboot into my newly LMDE installation.

Before rebooting I capture the first 512 bytes from the LMDE partition so i can boot into it from windows boot loader. rebooted the lap.

Resuts? GRUB WAS THERE! is this a bug? or is there a catch ? I lost my Windows installation as GRUB would not find it even when i ran the "os-probe" command and ran any other trick out there.

anybody has that same experience?

[leejosepho]

When reaching the partition selection I was able to see the NTFS partition for windows, and reused the old Nadia partition for LMDE, then the screen where I either select or de-select the GRUB installation came up. By default, GRUB Installation checkbox is checked.. so I cleared it as I don't want it.. I finalized the installation and it was time to reboot into my newly LMDE installation.

What I would have done there would be to install GRUB to the LMDE partition, then later either add that to the Win7 BCD or else make the LMDE partition active and use the GRUB loader at system start.

I lost my Windows installation...

anybody has that same experience?

Not exactly, but close. Fixing the win7 loader is not difficult. Do you need help with that?

[Talegolas]

When reaching the partition selection I was able to see the NTFS partition for windows, and reused the old Nadia partition for LMDE, then the screen where I either select or de-select the GRUB installation came up. By default, GRUB Installation checkbox is checked.. so I cleared it as I don't want it.. I finalized the installation and it was time to reboot into my newly LMDE installation.

What I would have done there would be to install GRUB to the LMDE partition, then later either add that to the Win7 BCD or else make the LMDE partition active and use the GRUB loader at system start.

I lost my Windows installation...

anybody has that same experience?

Not exactly, but close. Fixing the win7 loader is not difficult. Do you need help with that?

Thanks for the reply. There is no way to "fix" the win7 loader without mucking with MBR and thus the new win7 loader to be able to recognize the encrypted file system where Windows resides. And related to installing GRUB in the LMDE partition.. why is that? I mean, the only need for GRUB is to manage multiple OSes, and since I am already using win7 loader why would i need grub to be daisy chaining? I mean, i know it can be done, but i was bypassing GRUB or LILO already ..and the point is that the installation disk of LMDE disregards what you select in the option and just goes and installs GRUB at the "drive level" mucking with any other loader you might already have...or am I completely out of base with my interpretation of loaders?