Coder88
June 6th, 2013, 01:38 PM
SOLVED.
No thanks to anything obvious to even a novice like me. I read the GRUB2 manual/guide pdf, twice, finally came up with the solution which was far from obvious. The key is that fdisk -l gives me e.g. /dev/sda1 as my primary active drive and partition where my Windows7 resides, but that such mapping can often (according to the Grub pdf manual guide) *not* correlate with drives and partitions used in Grub. Wow. I was trying to configure Grub with set root=(hd0,msdos1) but when I learned to use the *autocompletion* feature of command line editing of the Grub menu during boot, I discovered that to boot Windows7 I had to use set root=(hd2,msdos1) Go figure. Anyhow, I was finally able to get Grub working to now boot into my ArtistX drive and also now to Windows7 on its own drive. Enough dragon slaying quests for today. Needless to say, I know a whole lot more about Grub2 today, a lot. In fact, to discover which hdx to use, I even took advantage of the filename autocompletion feature of grub's command line editing function, e.g. I would type: set root=(hd2,msdos1)/ then use TAB to see all the possibilities of filenames for booting which allowed me to discover that indeed hd2 contained Windows7 (/dev/sda1), not hd0 as one would have suspected. Again, hd(x) where x is the drive number starting with 0, does not always correlate with the /dev/sd(x) you get when using the fdisk command in linux. Golden info I now know.
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I am no stranger to linux, in fact I have ArtistX (ubuntu based distro) installed on a drive, Windows 7 on a separate drive. My problem is that Grub2 can not boot to Windows 7 (boots into ArtistX/ubuntu just fine). I edited Grub, added a Windows entry, but the issue as I discovered is a problem/bug involving Grub2 (hereafter called 'grub') and Western Digital (green/ecosmart?) hard drives and sector sizes, etc; so, I am here asking for advice and opinion on a workaround, because tinkering with a bootloader can get a geek into big trouble with an unusable system if not done right.
So here is my strategy (thoughts?)-- I switch (in the BIOS) the boot drive order from the drive with artistx/linux and grub on it to my Windows 7 x64 drive. Then I boot into Windows 7 as usual, install and use EasyBCD.exe to edit/use the Windows bootloader to create a dual boot system with Windows 7 and Linux. My understanding is that EasyBCD will edit (GUI interface) the Windows 7 boot config and EasyBCD will let me add a menu entry to trigger the grub on the drive with linux.
Another alternative but rather time consuming solution would be to reinstall linux and all that that involves to a drive other than the Western Digital drive that I installed linux onto. it does make me a bit nervous to have my dual boot management on the Windows 7 drive, as I am always skeptical on whether Windows will pull some funky maneuvers to eliminate the dual boot in the future; but I guess if that happened I could use the BIOS to boot into linux, back up my data, reinstall linux on a drive that plays nice with Grub, keep the bootloader as Grub at that time.
No thanks to anything obvious to even a novice like me. I read the GRUB2 manual/guide pdf, twice, finally came up with the solution which was far from obvious. The key is that fdisk -l gives me e.g. /dev/sda1 as my primary active drive and partition where my Windows7 resides, but that such mapping can often (according to the Grub pdf manual guide) *not* correlate with drives and partitions used in Grub. Wow. I was trying to configure Grub with set root=(hd0,msdos1) but when I learned to use the *autocompletion* feature of command line editing of the Grub menu during boot, I discovered that to boot Windows7 I had to use set root=(hd2,msdos1) Go figure. Anyhow, I was finally able to get Grub working to now boot into my ArtistX drive and also now to Windows7 on its own drive. Enough dragon slaying quests for today. Needless to say, I know a whole lot more about Grub2 today, a lot. In fact, to discover which hdx to use, I even took advantage of the filename autocompletion feature of grub's command line editing function, e.g. I would type: set root=(hd2,msdos1)/ then use TAB to see all the possibilities of filenames for booting which allowed me to discover that indeed hd2 contained Windows7 (/dev/sda1), not hd0 as one would have suspected. Again, hd(x) where x is the drive number starting with 0, does not always correlate with the /dev/sd(x) you get when using the fdisk command in linux. Golden info I now know.
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I am no stranger to linux, in fact I have ArtistX (ubuntu based distro) installed on a drive, Windows 7 on a separate drive. My problem is that Grub2 can not boot to Windows 7 (boots into ArtistX/ubuntu just fine). I edited Grub, added a Windows entry, but the issue as I discovered is a problem/bug involving Grub2 (hereafter called 'grub') and Western Digital (green/ecosmart?) hard drives and sector sizes, etc; so, I am here asking for advice and opinion on a workaround, because tinkering with a bootloader can get a geek into big trouble with an unusable system if not done right.
So here is my strategy (thoughts?)-- I switch (in the BIOS) the boot drive order from the drive with artistx/linux and grub on it to my Windows 7 x64 drive. Then I boot into Windows 7 as usual, install and use EasyBCD.exe to edit/use the Windows bootloader to create a dual boot system with Windows 7 and Linux. My understanding is that EasyBCD will edit (GUI interface) the Windows 7 boot config and EasyBCD will let me add a menu entry to trigger the grub on the drive with linux.
Another alternative but rather time consuming solution would be to reinstall linux and all that that involves to a drive other than the Western Digital drive that I installed linux onto. it does make me a bit nervous to have my dual boot management on the Windows 7 drive, as I am always skeptical on whether Windows will pull some funky maneuvers to eliminate the dual boot in the future; but I guess if that happened I could use the BIOS to boot into linux, back up my data, reinstall linux on a drive that plays nice with Grub, keep the bootloader as Grub at that time.