I am an experienced Linux user (I have been running Arch Linux for over 2 years, I started out on Ubuntu 5.04 many years ago ) and last night I attempted to install Kubuntu 12.10 on my girlfriend's HP Pavilion G7 and everything went smoothly until the very end of the installation where it installs Grub. The installer failed due to grub and I tried to run sudo grub-install /dev/sda manually and it said that /boot/grub wasn't accessible during boot, so instead of installing it to the MBR I attempted to install it to the partition (sda4) but got the same error. I was going to create a separate boot partition but was already at the maximum of 4 primary partitions since the HP Tools (factory image, diagnostics and all that good stuff)occupied the first partition, Windows 7 boot files occupied the second partition, Windows 7 itself occupied the third partition and Kubuntu occupied the 4th partition.

After looking up a few solutions, none applied to her and were all about (fake/software) RAID. So giving up for the moment, I rebooted only to find that Windows 7 would get to the "loading" screen for about a minute or two then BSOD and reboot. I tried to run start up repair but W7 couldn't detect the installation, so I tried the Windows installation disk and it wouldn't even detect the stupid HDD!

I booted up the Kubuntu live dvd once again and made sure that the HDD hadn't spontaneously died or got corrupted, everything was there. I went into the partition editor and noticed that the EXT4 partition that Kubuntu was installed on said that it had a corrupted Superblock. On a whim (since it was getting really late and I had to go to sleep)I deleted the EXT4 partiton and rebooted. To my surprise Windows booted like it did before I even attempted any of this.

In my years of using Linux I've have never seen something like this happen before. Does anyone know what would cause Windows 7 to BSOD and have the Installer not detect the HDD? Also how can I get Grub to install properly since she is allowing me to do it again and I want to get everything right this time so that I will give a good impression of the stability of Linux?