Lmde Dual boot

[seeyouentee]

Hope someone can help me I'm having trouble trying to install lmde on the same drive as windows 7. I managed to resize the windows partition to make way for lmde but am having trouble with where to put the root partition. Now I know the it goes where the windows mbr is but I cannot seem to get it to install to that. I'm getting a message please specify where (/) should go. Obviously I'm doing something wrong here but at the moment I haven't got a clue. Any help much appreciated.

[Aging Technogeek]

Your / (root) partition does not go in the mbr, it goes into the space you freed up from Windows. For a basic installation, swap will take up space up to twice your installed ram,and / will take up all the rest of the free space.

If you want to partition manually, / should have 8-12 GB, /home - 5-8 GB (or more if you have room and expect to store a lot of files in /home), and any other partitions you want will divide up the rest of the space.

The only thingthat installs to the mbr is the Grub bootloader and that is taken care of automatically by the installer.

For a very good and extremely detailed discussion of partitioning and installation, read this topic

[seeley]

Hi!
You have a live-CD with Mint where you can boot from?
Please post the output from Terminal as root:

Code: Select all

fdisk -l

"l" is not the digit 1 but a little "L" like list.
Normally, if Windows (first operating system) is installed, you shrink Windows and install Mint as second operating system and install the bootloader Grub into the MBR (of sda or hda).
My way installing Linux is:
1. Make partitions with GParted and give each partition a label (rootMint, homeMint,...)
2. Install Linux (Mint) and choose rootMint for "/" and homeMint for "/home".
If GParted is not on the live-CD i's easy to install.
seeley

[drt]

I went through adding LMDE to a Gateway laptop with Windows 7 a few days ago. There is a good video on installing at http://www.osgui.com. However he installs into a virtual machine but you can adapt. For your problem, after partitioning, go to the next page and double click the partition you want to be /, it gives you a menu and you choose.

Other details you might run into later on: there are a lot of updates to install. Toward the end of the updates it asked me about replacing /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf and I said yes. Later it wanted to configure grub-pc. (I chose an ext4 filesystem.) With grub it said something or other and I said yes. The actual grub menu that comes up puts linux first, then an entry for vista (I think it is a partition designed to restore Windows 7) and then the Windows 7 entry. Since the laptop is basically for my wife, who needs Windows applications that do not run on Linux I needed to change this to put Windows at the top and be the default. If you want to do this you may need a tutorial on grub. Basically it comes down to renaming a file in /etc/grub.d. Even so the new /boot/grub/grub.cfg file included that reference to the "vista" partition and so I went in to grub.cfg and commented out the lines for the vista menuentry. (You're not supposed to do this but I did not see any other way out.)

Don Tveter

[Azati Prime]

Yikes. This is a lot trickier to dual boot than Mint 10. I could have sworn the last version of LMDE was a little more automated than this. Here is what I have so far. Could someone take a look and let me know if I'm right?

I've seen mention of a /boot partition but I'm not sure where that would go or how big to make it. And what partition should grub go in?

[seeley]

Hi!
To save time to help others I standardized this first reply.
Some forum members don't know they are supposed to inform themselves before posting.
Well, please try to follow this procedure: First read Quickly get help
Search for a solution, both in the forum and on the internet.
I have written some HOWTOs:
Concerning LMDE: Howto install 201101 onto hard disk and Howto install 2012 Gnome 64 bit on USB flash
Your cooperation would be appreciated. Thanks.
I'm sure after having posted relevant details you will get personal help.
seeley

[Azati Prime]

Yeah I saw those posts already. Quite informative if you're doing a single boot but I just couldn't figure out how to translate that into a dual boot system. I know windows can be pretty picky about where it is on the disk.
I bookmarked the thread on installing to a USB drive but I don't think that's what I need right now.

[seeley]

Hi Azati!
There are some questions:
1. You should consider, if you want to install LMDE onto hard drive, to partition before installing. Although LMDE is a rolling distri, I recommend to create an own home partition (it is no bad idea to have personal data on an extra partition).
2. You want to use "Suspend to disk"? Then you need swap (size ~ 1.5 * RAM).
3. There are several possibilities concerning boot loader; I prefer - if you want dualboot or triple - to install GRUB"2" into the MBR of sda,
an

Code: Select all

sudo update-grub

normally will find all OSs and after rebooting you see the Grub menu and can select the system you want to start.
seeley

[cwsnyder]

Hi Azati!
There are some questions:
1. You should consider, if you want to install LMDE onto hard drive, to partition before installing. Although LMDE is a rolling distri, I recommend to create an own home partition (it is no bad idea to have personal data on an extra partition).
2. You want to use "Suspend to disk"? Then you need swap (size ~ 1.5 * RAM).
3. There are several possibilities concerning boot loader; I prefer - if you want dualboot or triple - to install GRUB"2" into the MBR of sda,
an

Code: Select all

sudo update-grub

normally will find all OSs and after rebooting you see the Grub menu and can select the system you want to start.
seeley

Caveat emptor: GRUB 1 or 2 will be clobbered by the Vista/7 bootloader if you ever have troubles with Windows Vista or Windows 7 and have to fix or re-install. Windows is not, repeat NOT, polite about clobbering any other operating system which gets in its way.

You can either learn BCDedit to find your Linux partition and load GRUB from the Vista/7 bootloader loaded in the Linux partition, or get used to fixing GRUB most times you have a Windows problem. Recommendation: Get a copy of the Super GRUB Disk 2 to fix boot problems with GRUB and learn how to use it.

It is really 'cleaner' to keep Windows Vista or Windows 7 on their own disk drives and select that drive from your system BIOS boot setup.

[gotjazz]

also - at least for xp but i don't see why it would be different for later windows versions, there's easybcd. A nice little gui tool to edit your windows bootloader.

[william]

Yeah I saw those posts already. Quite informative if you're doing a single boot but I just couldn't figure out how to translate that into a dual boot system. I know windows can be pretty picky about where it is on the disk.
I bookmarked the thread on installing to a USB drive but I don't think that's what I need right now.

If you are ok with Win7 contolling the boot process, just use EasyBCD (install it in Win7). If you do this method, when installing LMDE choose to have grub installed to / instead of the mbr (unless you want to create a different partition for it). Then boot to Win7 and set EasyBCD to look for Grub2. On reboot it should see it. This is how I did it and it is easy. Someday I may go third party on a boot loader but for now this is easy and works fine. Just figure out which partition setup you want for sure before doing it (I went with /, /home, and /swap - putting grub into the / partition).

Good luck!