Installing alongside Windows 7, but Mint 12 doesn't see Wind

[raptorxrx]

Hey guys, newbie here.

I am interested in installing Mint 12 on a partition of my Windows 7 drive. I have a partition unallocated for it, and Windows is installed. The easiest way I think would be to go with the one that is in the guide that says install alongside, but mine says that no other operating system is installed. I tried to install through the Something Else way, but I had no clue what to do when it said "No root file system is defined".

Any help would be appreciated!

[veggen]

You're saying many conflicting things... and you seem a bit over your head in this, but here goes.
If Mint installer does not give you an option to automatically create a partition for itself (which it doesn't, for you, if I got it right), you should choose to do so manually ("Something else").
The steps you need to take are:

1- Split a chunk from one of the existing partitions (by using partition resizing tool provided) and size it properly (give it at least 20GB, it will work with less but will bite you eventually)
2- Create an ext4 partition out of the unallocated chunk created in the step above, but leave a bit for swap (see below)
3- Create swap space out of the remaining unallocated space
4- Choose "/" as mount point for ext4 partition
5- Proceed with installation

NOTE: If you make a mistake, you can easily destroy your existing partitions loosing all data you have on them. This can happen even if you do not do anything wrong, but is unlikely. Backup everything of importance and triple-check everything before resizing/modifying partitions.
NOTE 2: I've seen it many times that people report problems when dual booting with Windows Vista/7. Something about boot loaders. On the other hand, most users have no problems at all. Make sure you read a little on this topic (search the forum) beforehand to see if it concerns you or not.

I hope I didn't forget anything, but if I did, someone please chip in.

[raptorxrx]

I was able to install Manually by creating four partitions, SWAP, /, /boot, and/home. I thought everything was going well and it installed. When I went to reboot though, I didn't get a dual boot screen. It just went straight to Windows. I checked to see if Windows saw Linux Mint 12 in the Advanced Settings menu, and it did not. I believe I have a problem with the two operating systems not recognizing each other now, and am not sure what to do about that.

[wayne128]

Can you do this:

boot from Live DVD / CD of your Linux OS.
open a terminal, type these commands and post their results

1. sudo os-prober
2. sudo fdisk -l
3. sudo parted -l print

[raptorxrx]

sudo os-prober.png (16.42 KiB) Viewed 1055 times

.png (53.01 KiB) Viewed 1055 times

sudo parted.png (72.39 KiB) Viewed 1055 times

[mintybits]

I can give you a hint. Your 500GB disk has a GPT (GUID Partition Table) scheme rather than a conventional MBR partition scheme. Installing Mint/Ubuntu to a GPT and making it bootable off the GPT disk is tricky and you will have to Google for methods.

Alternatives:
1) Install grub to a different device that has an MBR scheme. Another HD or a USB stick or other. You can have linux on the GPT disk but boot from a different disk. You probably wont be able to boot Windows using Grub, tho., so you can choose between them in the bios boot menu.
2) Reformat the 500GB disk as MBR and reinstall Windows and linux. There is no necessity from a partitioning point of view to use GPT on a disk under 2GiB size.