17 thoughts on - Installing C7 On A Laptop With Win7, Dual Boot

• If your laptop is powerful enough and its processor supports hardware
  virtualization, you can have both systems running at the same time
  with almost no speed decrease. There are free virtualization solutions
  such as Virtual Box. You would instsl C7 and then create a virtual
  machine for Windows. When you need Windows, just run it in a window.

  Dual boot is a PITA.

• yeah, I know!

  this is a netbook with a dual core 1.6Ghz Atom. not very powerful.

  I also don’t have any installation media, all I have is the running Windows system, so I’d have to figure out how to turn a “real” machine into a VM. I know its doable, I’m just not sure I want to go that route.

  but thanks for the suggestion!

  Fred

• ———— Original Message ———-

• So, I did this. I’m assuming that ‘name’ should be bare, with no quotes?
  well, I tried it both ways, makes no difference. The grub-mkconfig does not emit any lines about having found windows. its output looks the same as what I showed in the original mail, above.

  there are 3 windows partitions, two of which appeared in grub previously. Here’s the entry I made:

  menuentry Win-7 {
  insmod ntfs set root=(hd0,1)
  chainloader +1
  }

  I can still access the files (I made an image of the disk), but grub2
  configurations are not human-readable, so I can’t figure it out from that. however, if I look at the drive image with fdisk, it shows partition 2
  as being bootable, so I used (hd0,1). maybe I s hould try (hd0,2) as an alternative…

• ———— Original Message ———-

• Short solution:
  Does /etc/default/grub contain ‘GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=”true” ? If so, comment that out and rerun the grub2-mkconfig command.

• No mention of the Fedora installation either. So how are you going to boot Fedora 19?

  Honestly this is one of those things that convinces me we’re in the 5th epoch of computing dark age insanity. Windows n and Windows n+1; OS X n and OS X n + 1 are bullet proof dual booting and never involved the user in this sort of madness. On Linux, it’s like, we step on our own tails, we step on every distro’s tails, we make this completely crazy complex and things don’t work (automatically).

  What *I* would do >> I would use the Fedora GRUB instance as primary. And I
  would have its 40_custom include the proper lines for Windows 7, and an additional entry in 40_custom for CentOS using the configfile command to point to the CentOS grub.cfg.

  That way you have a single GRUB menu that always has up-to-date kernels. The kernel updater only updates the distro specific grub.cfg, so using configfile to point to other distros is the correct way grub2-mkconfig should be creating “master” grub.cfgs in the first place. But no, we are living in the Pleistocene where things have to be made more difficult than necessary.

  Of course you could use CentOS as primary, modify its 40_custom to have the Windows chainloader and Fedora configfile forwarding entries. Thing is, you want the newest GRUB binaries to be primary and usually that’s Fedora. In your case with CentOS 7 and Fedora 19 it’s probably a draw. But as Fedora
  19 is EOL, you probably want to fedup that system to Fedora 21 one of these days :-D.

  Chris Murphy

• No, it doesn’t contain that line.

• Ah, perhaps I didn’t think to mention that I was installing CentOS
  as a replacement for F19 (which is now EOL).

• Yes, I do see that, and it does work. Thanks for the help!

  I’ll see if I can add another stanza for the windows recovery partition, for just in case it becomes necessary.

  thanks again!

• If you want “dodge” a fight with grub, you can install EasyBCD (to windows OS) and handles multiple systems. (you can found a trial version):

  http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

  I use it to handles 4 os

  tell me…

  Pol

• 1) Install ntfs “support”
  yum install -y epel-release yum install -y ntfs-3g ntfsprogs

  2) re-run the grub config gen script grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

  Best, M

• Ah, Mario, that’s exactly what I needed to know! thanks!

  It seems rather like a chicken-and-the-egg problem, which came first?
  you can’t install ntfs-3g until you’ve installed the system, and it won’t notice the windows partition(s) there until you’ve installed ntfs-3g. But it sets up the grub config at install time, so you get a system apparently without windows support.

  A newbie (which I’m not) would certainly find this confusing/disheartening.

  Thanks again for the solution I needed!

  Fred

• Weird. So that means os-prober isn’t finding Windows. What do you get for the following commands:

  # parted /dev/sdX u s p ##X= drive with windows on it
  # os-prober

• You did, I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Sorry.

• Ahh yes, good tip.

  I’m pretty sure dual-boot on CentOS is de-emphasized or maybe flat out not supported, is probably why ntfs3-g isn’t on the installer media. On Fedora, that’s a required based package because of explicit dual boot support, and it’s necessary because the installer uses ntfs-3g to resize the Windows volume to make room for Fedora.

  —
  Chris Murphy

• So that’s why it worked with F19. I sure didn’t know Anaconda could resize the Windoze partition for you… I did it with gparted-live when I installed F19.

  As my mom used to say: “You live and learn!: