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Triple boot Win 7, XP, and Mint 14

Posted: Sun Jan 06, 2013 8:05 pm
by StevePMo
As the title says, I am considering doing a triple boot on my system,

System specs are..
Win 7 on a 1 TB Samsung Sata HD
Win XP on a Western Digital 640 GB Sata HD
Processor is AMD Phenom II X4 970
8 GB G Skill DDR2 ( 4 X 2 GB sticks )
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P
PSU: PC Power and Cooling 750 Watt
Graphics card is AMD HD 6950 2 GB
Monitor: Samsung 19" Widescreen LCD

What I want to know is, what would be the "safest" way to install Mint 14 on my system? My thoughts are to install it to the drive running XP, as IF I lose an OS, XP would be the least painful to lose, as I rarely boot into it anymore.

What are the possible problems I might encounter? What are the chances of me screwing up my Win 7 install?

Re: Triple boot Win 7, XP, and Mint 14

Posted: Sun Jan 06, 2013 9:16 pm
by Orbmiser
1) Defrag both Win7 & Winxp first
2) In Win7 I went to Disk Management and resized my winXP partion and left what I needed unallocated.
3) Choose something else at the where to install mint dialog. And can Create your ext4 partitions using unallocated space.

Questions to answer for your needs.

Do you want a separate partition for /home?
Advantages is if doing clean installs over root with new distro's your personal data is safe on /home.
So either setu a /root & swap or a / /home & swap for your setup. At least 15gb for root more if not setting up separate /home partition and 2gb is fine for swap. /home if setup on separate partition depends how much in the way of personal files like movies,pictures,music,etc.. 30gb good start with little in way of large libraries of music,movies,etc...

Do want grub to overwrite mbr of your Win7 loader?
I didn't so at bottom of setting up partition section there is an entry at the bottom on where grub should be installed.
I pointed at my / root which was sda5 in my case. Then in Win7 side I use easyBCD to create a menu entry for it on the Win7 loader.
It know as chain loading bootloaders. Advantage is don't have to worry about grub failure mucking up my win7 loader.

Disadvantage is have two menus to boot thru. Win7 then grub menu. A change timeouts for each to 5 secs. as to minimize boot up delay.
.

Re: Triple boot Win 7, XP, and Mint 14

Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 12:01 am
by StevePMo
Ok, I installed Mint 14 Cinnamon 64 bit, but when I get to the grub menu after choosing Linux in my boot screen, it just sits there with : grub> If I type boot in, I get Error 8 Kernel must be loaded in order to boot ( or words to that effect ) I then realized I did something wrong after watching a video on YouTube, and tried installing again, deleted the partition I created in the Mint install screen, then created a swap file, and a partition to install. Installed Mint 14 again, and STILL get the same error. What am I doing wrong? I used Easy BCD in Win 7 to set the boot parameter for Linux, choosing grub 2 in Easy BCD. Same Result on my third attempt to install. No boot, just the Kernel error message.

I have a dual boot system with Win 7 on drive c, and Win XP on drive d. I used Disk manager in Win 7 to create a 100 GB partition on drive d to install Linux. Is that my problem? Do I need to use C drive to install Linux?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Re: Triple boot Win 7, XP, and Mint 14

Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 12:11 am
by wayne128
StevePMo wrote: I used Easy BCD in Win 7 to set the boot parameter for Linux, choosing grub 2 in Easy BCD. Same Result on my third attempt to install. No boot, just the Kernel error message.

I have a dual boot system with Win 7 on drive c, and Win XP on drive d. I used Disk manager in Win 7 to create a 100 GB partition on drive d to install Linux. Is that my problem? Do I need to use C drive to install Linux?
You may want to check hard disk partition first.
Boot computer with Live DVD, open a terminal and type a few commands, post their results.
1. sudo fdisk -l
2. parted -l
3. sudo os-prober

Re: Triple boot Win 7, XP, and Mint 14

Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 12:48 am
by StevePMo
mint@mint ~ $ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 640.1 GB, 640135028736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77825 cylinders, total 1250263728 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x658b658b

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 63 1044951039 522475488+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 1044953086 1065482239 10264577 5 Extended
/dev/sda3 1065482240 1250263039 92390400 83 Linux
/dev/sda5 1044953088 1065482239 10264576 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000203804160 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953523055 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x42d54208

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 2048 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdb2 206848 1953519615 976656384 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT


mint@mint ~ $ parted -l
Warning: Unable to open /dev/sr1 read-write (Read-only file system). /dev/sr1
has been opened read-only.
Error: Invalid partition table - recursive partition on /dev/sr1.
Ignore/Cancel?
Ignore/Cancel? ignore
Model: Unknown (unknown)
Disk /dev/sr1: 924MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 2048B/2048B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags

mint@mint ~ $ sudo os-prober
/dev/sda3:Linux Mint 14 Nadia (14):LinuxMint:linux
/dev/sdb1:Windows 7 (loader):Windows:chain


Ok, here is what I got when typing in your commands. lets hope you see something amiss here !! haha

Re: Triple boot Win 7, XP, and Mint 14

Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 1:29 am
by wayne128
fdisk on both hard disk seem OK
parted -l seem to have lots of information but I think you cut them off?? :mrgreen:

anyway, just try to probe grub.cfg file and reinstall grub.

1. boot computer with Live DVD/USB
2. open terminal and type this
sudo mount /dev/sda3 /mnt
cat /mnt/boot/grub/grub.cfg

post their output

3. reinstall grub to root partition by this command
sudo grub-install --force --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda3

4. reboot to Win7
run EasyBCD
go to edit menu
delete the old grub2 entry you had
add a new entry of grub2

hopefully this simple method works..if not

5. go to get boot repair CD https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair
and follow their procedure to repair grub.

Re: Triple boot Win 7, XP, and Mint 14

Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 8:29 pm
by StevePMo
mint@mint ~ $ sudo mount /dev/sda3/mnt
mount: can't find /dev/sda3/mnt in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab
mint@mint ~ $ cat /mnt/boot/grub/grub.cfg
cat: /mnt/boot/grub/grub.cfg: No such file or directory

Looks to be a problem here... I tried reinstalling grub per your instructions anyway, and got an error message too.

mint@mint ~ $ sudo grub-install --force --root-directory=/mnt/dev/sda3
grub-probe: error: failed to get canonical path of /cow.
Install device isn't specified.
Usage: grub-install.real [OPTION] [INSTALL_DEVICE]
Install GRUB on your drive.

-h, --help print this message and exit
-v, --version print the version information and exit
--modules=MODULES pre-load specified modules MODULES
--boot-directory=DIR install GRUB images under the directory DIR/grub
instead of the /boot/grub directory
--target=TARGET install GRUB for TARGET platform
[default=current]
--directory=DIR use GRUB images from DIR. Takes precedence
over target
--grub-setup=FILE use FILE as grub-setup
--grub-mkimage=FILE use FILE as grub-mkimage
--grub-mkrelpath=FILE use FILE as grub-mkrelpath
--grub-probe=FILE use FILE as grub-probe
--allow-floppy make the drive also bootable as floppy (default
for fdX devices). May break on some BIOSes.
--recheck delete device map if it already exists
--force install even if problems are detected
--force-file-id use identifier file even if UUID is available
--disk-module=MODULE disk module to use (biosdisk or native). This
option is only available on BIOS target.
--no-nvram don't update the `boot-device' NVRAM
variable. This option is only available on
IEEE1275 targets.
--removable the installation device is removable. This option
is only available on EFI.
--bootloader-id=ID the ID of bootloader. This option is only
available on EFI.
--efi-directory=DIR use DIR as the EFI System Partition root.
--uefi-secure-boot install an image usable with UEFI Secure
Boot. This option is only available on EFI and if
the grub-efi-amd64-signed package is installed.
--no-uefi-secure-boot do not install an image usable with UEFI Secure
Boot, even if the system was currently started
using it. This option is only available on EFI.

INSTALL_DEVICE must be system device filename.

grub-install.real copies GRUB images into /boot/grub, and uses grub-setup
to install grub into the boot sector.


Report bugs to <bug-grub@gnu.org>.

Re: Triple boot Win 7, XP, and Mint 14

Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 8:42 pm
by wayne128
your command is not my command :lol:

for example
mine

Code: Select all

sudo mount /dev/sda3 /mnt
yours
mint@mint ~ $

Code: Select all

 sudo mount /dev/sda3/mnt
there is a space between
/dev/sda3

and

/mnt

so please redo, with the space

for mint@mint ~ $ sudo grub-install --force --root-directory=/mnt/dev/sda3

there is a missing space between
/mnt

and

/dev/sda3

Re: Triple boot Win 7, XP, and Mint 14

Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 8:48 pm
by StevePMo
I gave up, and deleted the partition, and reformatted. i am downloading again, and will burn to a new DVD, and see if maybe there was something wrong with the other file. i will report back soon. Is there any particular spot I should aim Grub to when i install? The root directory? Or should i create a small partition dedicated to grub? OR, just send it to whatever location the installer chooses?

Re: Triple boot Win 7, XP, and Mint 14

Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 8:57 pm
by wayne128
StevePMo wrote:I gave up, and deleted the partition, and reformatted. i am downloading again, and will burn to a new DVD, and see if maybe there was something wrong with the other file. i will report back soon. Is there any particular spot I should aim Grub to when i install? The root directory? Or should i create a small partition dedicated to grub? OR, just send it to whatever location the installer chooses?
for your case.

stay with Win7 controlling MBR.

then when you install Linux, select install boot loader to the root directory.

no need to bother small partition to grub, you get more mess to deal with.

after installing linux os, your computer still will boot to Win7.
in win7, run easybcd, delete the old grub2 entry, add a new grub2 entry, and hope it works

Re: Triple boot Win 7, XP, and Mint 14

Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 8:58 pm
by StevePMo
Thanks for your help Wayne!! Wish me luck!! :lol:

Well, exact same result.... I think I'll give it a rest for a while, and try later, haha

Re: Triple boot Win 7, XP, and Mint 14

Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2013 8:45 pm
by StevePMo
Well, I found my problem, and it had nothing to do with the way I installed Mint. I was using an older version of EasyBCD, and apparently it doesn't play well with Mint 13 and 14s version of Grub, so I installed the newest version of EasyBCD, and whala !! Mint works !!! Thanks to all for the help.