General :: Disk Partitions For Dual Boot With Windows 7 GPT/EFI
Jan 9, 2011
I have a Centos 5.5 system that had 2 primary partitions (2nd is setup as LVM with multiple LVM partitions) and then installed Windows 7 as Dual Boot.
However, Windows 7 has installed a 200MB system partition which is GPT/EFI as partition 3 and the Win7 OS as a Primary Partition.
I have a heap of space undefined after this fourth primary partition.
However, as 4 primary partitions have been used, I can no longer create an extended partition to utilise this.
As such I would like to know what is the best and safest way to proceed, and if possible step by steps instructions for the best option eg:
1. Delete the Windows 7 System Partition and create the extended partition (I expect this will prevent Windows from booting)
2. Use something like partition magic to change the Win 7 OS Partition 4 to an extended partition (Not sure if this will work)
3. Make changes to the overall system including both Linux and Windows so that it will use GPT only (I have
had no experience with GPT so this is a bit scary)
I'm setting up a new Dell as dual boot. I'm leaning toward first partition for Windows 7, a second partition that can be accessed from either OS, and an extended partition that will have root, swap, /home, etc. For the partition to be accessible to both, what is the preferred format? I've read that FAT32 or NTFS will suffice. ext4 is what I understand should be set for the linux partitions. For the linux partitions, is there an advantage to setting one or two of the partitions as primary, rather than logical? Also, any clear advantages or disadvantages to having a /boot partition? It is likely I'll only have installed one version of Ubuntu at a time.
I am running a dual boot with XP and Ubuntu - what I want to do is increase the partition size of Ubuntu and reduce XP. When I run " G Parted" it shows both partitions with Xp being NTFS. I guess the boot loader is Grub because Ubuntu takes priority at Boot. I cannot persuade G Parted to allow me to resize the two different partitions. I am using the G Parted Live CD.
I have Windows 10 and Deb 8 dual boot, and I need to re-install Windows but want to avoid (or at least plan for) losing Grub/Linux boot.
Last time I re-installed Windows after Linux I ended up having to re-install Linux again afterwards as well, because I couldn't recover it (seemingly due to complications from encryption). So this time I'm wanting to plan and avoid that.
CURRENT DISK PARTITIONS:
Code: Select allsda1 | 550M | EFI System sda2 | 128M | Microsoft reserved sda3 | 175.8G | Microsoft basic data sda4 | 286M | Linux filesystem (Boot) sda5 | 28.2G | Linux filesystem (Root) sda6 | 91.3G | Linux filesystem (Home) sda7 | 1.9G | Linux swap
[Code] ....
As there is a "Microsoft Reserved" partition and a separate Microsoft directory within the EFI partition, if I just go ahead and reinstall Windows will it install it's boot loader/image to one of it's own partitions? And NOT affect anything else like Grub and other Linux things?
Logic tells me yes, but there seems to be many issues on the internet about installing Windows after Linux.
My primary concern is whatever happens with Windows or anything to do with dual loading etc, is that Linux will still just boot, or I can get it working again without much hassle.
Why is there a reserved Microsoft partition AND a Microsoft directory in the EFI partition? Which one boots Windows?
Why is there a separate Linux Boot partition AND a Linux directory in the EFI partition? Which one boots Linux? Where is Grub invoked from, is one redundant, etc?
How these work. It is possible I've set them up wrong, or with redundant partitions, but both systems have been booting ok for months.
I am editing this post to save people time and effort. This is one of those "Pilot Error" issues or faulty readout issue, not sure which. It turns out that when I saved a document in PDF format to my NTFS Drive (the one I want to share between Windows XP and Ubuntu 10) the .PDF file extension was missing.
1. Ubuntu identified the files as a PDF document (even though the file extension was not there)
2. When trying to access it by double clicking it, the message was "Unable to open document, Permission Denied"
The problem was not permissions, and it was not a PDF file according to the default Document Viewer, but it WAS a PDF file according to the directory listing. The permissions message really had nothing to do with the problem, and identifying the file as a PDF document when it didn't have an extension, was another problem. What SHOULD have happened is a file without an extension should not be identified as a PDF file or If Ubuntu says it's a PDF file, and I double click it, why is the message "Permission Denied" ?? How about "No File Extension" or something like that?
Read the following if you want to see what my problem WAS before I just appended ,PDF to the filename, and now it works fine. On the positive side, installing XP first, then setting aside a large chunk of space for a shared NTFS drive, and THEN installing Ubuntu in the free space works fine. I installed a new 320 GB drive on laptop. Installed Win XP in 32 GB Set aside 250 GB for another Windows partition using MANAGE and formatted D: as an NTFS drive Then successfully Installed ubuntu 10 into remaining unused space. Problem: Ubuntu cannot access files from D: (NTFS Windows) partition. but it can WRITE files without problems, and create directories, just not read them. Have set properties of the Windows drive to shared, still nada. Any trick I'm missing? If I plug in an external USB drive, Ubuntu can read/write to it easily, it just can't read from the 250 GB partition formatted in Windows XP that I wanted to share between operating systems.
I would like to install Ubuntu on an HP Laptop, but they have taken up the whole disk with 4 partitions. I have removed Linux partitions and made an extended one in it's place creating new UUIDs before, but i am worried that windows will not recognize the new partition.
I would like to combine my Linux partition (/sda3) and /sad1 to give me more disc space. I would also like to combine the two unallocated partitions to install a Windows 7 dual-boot with Ubuntu. How would I do that without totally raping my current Ubuntu install?
Today I decided to give Fedora15 a shot, mainly because of Gnome3, and so decided to install it over my Ubuntu installation. This is my partition scheme:Two NTFS partitions for Windows;
One logical partition, which inside has: /dev/sda5 for /boot /dev/sda6 for /
I'm fairly new to ubuntu. I set up dual boot with 10.4 (64bit) on a machine with windows 7 installed first.Everything worked just fine but it seems that there is a bunch of unallocated space on my hard drive. Can anyone explain what all the different partitions are and if/how I can "clean it up"?
I have a (slightly complicated) dual/multi boot system.
I keep getting boot errors (when choosing ubuntu from the grub2 menu)
Code: Serious errors were found while checking the disk drive for /boot
If I switch off and restart, ubuntu will then start without issue.
My setup is like this ....3 disks, one with 10.10 clean install - so Grub2, separate partitions for /, /boot and /home, one with windows 7, one with windows XP and 10.04 wubi (this is my old disk which I will trash once I'm happy with my upgrade to 10.10 & 7 on separate disks.
I installed 7 and 10.10 with ONLY their disks installed. After both were working, I added all disks and rejigged the grub2 menu (using update-grub and StartUp-Manager).
This problem only seems to occur if my previous boot was not 10.10 ( I will investigate this further). It's as if something (grub2 ?, the bios ?) is remembering part of the previous boot and not using the grub2 menu completely.
I've been wanting to do this for a while and after upgrading some of my pc components I decided I would finally try to dual boot with full disk encryption on both windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10. I managed to encrypt the windows drive with truecrypt and that worked. I installed Ubuntu 9.10 using the alternate cd and everything but /boot is in an encrypted LVM. Each OS is on a separate SATA drive the windows is on sda1 and ubuntu /boot is sdb1.
To setup the dual boot I started out following the tutorial [url] but its for XP and versions of ubuntu that use grub not grub 2. I ran dd as posted and saved the files it produced from truecrypt. I then ran into some problems with grub reinstallation so I simply reinstalled Ubuntu 9.10 from scratch again. This put grub 2 on the computer. I've managed to get it to add a Windows 7 option.
However, when the option is selected truecrypt comes up and says that the bootloader is corrupted and that I need to use the repair CD I burned before I encrypted the drive. My question is does anyone have any experience dual booting using Truecrypt on Windows 7 and LUKS/dm-crypt on Ubuntu 9.10 with grub 2? And how would I get the boot menu to work? I'd rather not reinstall but if I have to I have images from right before I encrypted so it wouldn't be the end of the world.
I have a dual boot System with Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Remix and Windows XP SP3 on an Asus eeePC 1000HE. I had some troubles with updating kernels etc. and I ended up with following problem:
After grub reinstall, I am able to boot Ubuntu, also I can mount the windows partition properly. Trying to boot into Windows, I get the error:
Code:
It's all on one hard drive which doesn't show any errors:
Code:
Partition table entries are not in disk order
Code:
Some partitions don't show a file system because they are luks-encrypted.
As I mentioned earlier, I am able to mount sda1. I think the problem is that the Partition Boot Sector is corrupted, even though I am not sure if the ntfs partition is damaged at all or if GRUB is the problem.
As I said I had problems with a kernel update and therefore had to reinstall GRUB. I think, but I am not sure, that I accidentally installed GRUB on sda1 (the windows partition) instead of on sda. After I installed GRUB on sda again, I was able to boot linux and fixed sda1 with testdisk. Before, sda1 showed as four partitions (sda1p1, ... , sda1p4). I was not able to mount sda1 till I fixed it with testdisk. testdisk says the Boot Sector of sda1 is OK, so does ntfsfix.
Finally, an extract from my /boot/grub/menu.lst:
Code: ...
The Windows XP entry is added by myself. I don't know much about grub, so there might be the error.
I tried to keep it as short as possible (this is only the end of the story), I hope I didn't forget anything important. Please ask if there is something not clear.
I am in Tanzania with this netbook, so it is not possible to boot Windows CD and fix the windows partition with it, also I don't have a very fast Internet connection.
Is there a way to fix this without a Windows CD? Maybe it is just a dumb mistake in the menu.lst?
I just successfully installed ubuntu 10.10 Meerkat Maverik parallel to manufacturer installed Windows 7 Professional on a newly bought ThinkPad t410. All works find just that on the boot screen instead of 1 Windows partition (usually something like "Windows 7 loader on sda1") I find two Windows partitions. Now, I know that Thinkpads have a recovery partition. Funny is though that both "Windows 7 loader on sda1/2" login to what seems the identical Windows (not one of them the "normal" and the other some form of a recovery).
I have been having problems hibernating my windows 7 partition recently. It happened approximately right after I set up the dual boot.
I have found other topics where it says to make sure that the windows 7 partition is marked as the active partition. I have since done so and it has not changed anything. I did it with Partition Magic on Windows. I did find it suspicious though that my Dell Recovery partition is labeled as boot while the Windows one is marked as Active and System.
However when I looked at it using disk utility in Ubuntu the windows 7 partition is marked as Bootable while the recovery partition is not.
Hibernation works on Ubuntu with a couple error messages while shutting down and some weird screen issues while booting up. But it ends up working decently.
Under Disk Utility the Ubuntu Partition is not marked as Bootable. Should it be?
I have a dual boot Acer Aspire One, after reinstalling Windows back to "original factory", the way it was straight out of the box, it now will not boot up at all. It goes to the Windows start screen goes blank, and loops there infinitely. Is there a USB tool I can use to figure out what went wrong and recover either my Windows or Linux partition with out having to do a complete reinstall?
I have been an MCSA for the last 20 years, but recently I have been very impressed indeed with Ubuntu 11.04, having dabbled with and then discarded Susi Linux some five years ago. My problem may be summarised as outlined below: Using the downloadable ISO I installed Ubuntu 11.04 as a dual boot on a Win7 100GB HDD on my Lenovo T61 laptop. No problem they both rock and I'm very impressed. During the installation procedure I selected the largest partition sizes available from the Ubuntu installer wizard being 25GB Extended split into 18GB Ext4, and 3.2GB and 3.2 GB swaps (I couldn't suss out any way of manually increasing them any further).
I found that the 11.04 Startup Manager application didn't work at all, so I downloaded and installed Grub Customizer 2.1..and that did work after a fashion.. certainly enough to actually effect changes in the grub configuration settings. Everything worked so well on the 100GB HDD that I decided to transpose the entire disk image to a new 500GB WD Scorpio and make the dual boot my main working disk. Using Acronis I imaged off the 100GB installation selecting the partition by partition, and retain disk signature options. I then recovered the image to the new 500GB HDD and everything works beautifully on the new HDD.
Except of course all the partitions are still the same size. I won't waste your reading time recounting everything that I have done using Acronis Disk Director (V Good) and Gparted (not so good), but needless to say whatever I do Grub won't have it, and I have lost count of the times that I have re-recovered the good image. Basically I want to increase the partion sizes to apportion larger partitions to both Win 7 and 11.04 and obviously I'm missing something somewhere.
Fdisk -l -u produces.. Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 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: 0x9f011ed1 .....
I am having 2 Hard Disk 1 is having RHEL 5 Installed And 2nd is having Windows XP, now i want to dual boot my PC with the help of this two Hard Disk? Can i Dual Boot with RHEL & Win XP having Installed in 2 different HD? what is the Procedure?
I'm having installation issues with linux. I'm trying to set up a dual boot with vista and linux. I prepared my computer by backing up my files and partitioning my hard drive, leaving 20GB for linux. I downloaded Linux Mint 7, and booted from USB (using the universal USB installer from pendrivelinux.com). All good, entered into linux and installed by following the prompts (selecting use largest unallocated partition to point linux to the partition). At this stage the screen cleared to just leave me with the desktop background.
I patiently waited for it to reboot which never happened. So I waited for 20mins or so, then shut the computer down because I couldn't think of what else to do. When I restarted (without using the livecd/usb) it just went straight to vista. I did a bit of reading and found it might have been something to do with vista taking over grub, and some of the tutorials suggested downloading EasyBCD. So I did that, here's the summary:
Code: There are a total of 2 entries listed in the Vista Bootloader. Bootloader Timeout: 30 seconds. Default OS: Linux Mint 7
Entry #1 Name: Microsoft Windows Vista BCD ID: {current} Drive: C: Bootloader Path: Windowssystem32winload.exe Windows Directory: Windows
Entry #2 Name: Linux Mint 7 BCD ID: {default} Drive: C: Bootloader Path: NST st_grub.mbr
Windows Boot Loader identifier {3fb6bf63-700d-11db-8409-0016d303c867} device partition=C: path Windowssystem32winload.exe description Microsoft Windows Vista locale en-US inherit {6efb52bf-1766-41db-a6b3-0ee5eff72bd7} recoverysequence {572bcd55-ffa7-11d9-aae2-0007e994107d} recoveryenabled Yes osdevice partition=C: systemroot Windows resumeobject {3fb6bf64-700d-11db-8409-0016d303c867} nx OptIn
Real-mode Boot Sector identifier {bbf9569e-31e5-11df-a844-91f7867d7949} device partition=C: path NST st_grub.mbr description Linux Mint 7
Now when I turn my computer on, I get options for vista and linux. Vista works fine, but if I select Linux Mint 7 I get an error that reads "cannot load from harddisk, insert systemdisk and press any key".
I am quite experienced user of Ubuntu desktop / server distributions. Recently my desktop 9.10 disk failed and I decided to reinstall using 10.04. My configuration is a dual disk dual bot system. I have XP Pro SP3 on one disk and Ubuntu 10.04 on second. XP has own, untached MBR ubuntu got Grub 2 installed on the same disk as Ubuntu. Ubuntu disk is booting first in BIOS. Grub 2 detected both system, however I can boot only to Ubuntu. When I am trying to boot XP I got black screen only. Looks like booting is stack in BIOS stage, because crt+alt+del reset system.
I read Ubuntu forum, search Google and did not come with any solutions. My XP MBR is OK. I can boot directly, choosing XP HDD in BIOS as a starting disk. All entries in grub.cfg looks fine to me. I made 3 different clear installations of Ubuntu. Each with the same result. I reinstaled Grub2 with no effect. I wonder if this may be a hardware/Grub 2 compatibility issue. I am using quite old components.My motherboard is Assus P4C800 Delux. I have 5 HDDs 2 CD. Exactly the same configuration was OK with 9.10/XP dual disk dual boot using Grub legacy.
The problem is this: I have a 320gb HDD splitted in 4 partitions. When I first installed Windows XP I formatted the HDD in 3 (Windows system partition, Media partition and another one I left for Linux). However Linux requires another partition for swap. Everything was just fine. One day Windows stopped working and I tried re-installing it. After the system was ready to start, Windows failed to boot with "NTLDR is missing" message. I tried to recover the Master boot record, even replaced NTLDR manually - nothing worked. I read that in order a HDD to be partitioned in more than 3 parts the so called "extended" partitions must be created. I think this may cause the problem but I don't want to wipe out everything (I have more than 100 GB of books most of which are not available anymore in the same locations I have downloaded them)
Slackware 13.0 32-bit is installed on /dev/sda5 with lilo written to that partition. Everything works and I have a nice lilo boot menu (for a WinXP bootable partion). Recently I installed Slack 13.0 64-bit on /dev/sdb5. This also succeeded (apparently). After reboot I was presented with my old boot menu, selected the 32-bit Linux option (/dev/sda5) and after login went to /etc/lilo.conf where I entered a boot stanza for /dev/sdb5 (64-bit linux), and then ran /sbin/lilo. No errors flagged. After reboot there was a 64-bit entry in the boot menu, but when selected it led to kernel panic. Further although I can mount /dev/sdb5 from the 32-bit partition there is nothing in it except lost+found.
So the current position is that I can't access my 64-bit linux partition (/dev/sdb5) to change anything in it (even boot: root=/dev/sdb5 at the boot prompt doesn't seem to work).how do I obtain access to /dev/sdb5? Second question is what items do I need in the 32-bit lilo.conf boot stanza so as to be able to boot to that 64 linux partition?
Maybe the problem is with the 32-bit addressing? How do I get lilo to use LBA32 for the 32-bit partition (/dev/sda5) and LBA64 addressing for the 64-bit partition (/dev/sdb5)?
I'm trying to install Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit on my laptop HP pavilion 3046ee . When I reach the partition part , it doesn't detect the Windows 7 os , and doesn't detect any hard disk partitions ( it sees the whole hard disk as one unallocated partition ). I faced the same problem when I tried Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
I am running Ubuntu 9.10 dual boot with Windows XP, on my 120GB hard drive I currently have the following partitions
a) 42GB - with WindowsXP installed b) 10GB - for WindowsXP storage c) 3.1GB - accidentally made when installing Ubuntu d) 62GB - With Ubuntu installed e) 2.7GB - swap space for ubuntu
I very rarely use WinXP and have nothing on b or c, so my question is can I get rid of those partitions to make d 75GB total without having to reinstall Ubuntu?
I was running Ubuntu 10.04 as my only OS. I then booted from the Ubuntu CD and divided my HD into two partitions, one for my Ubuntu and the other I formatted to NTFS so I could load Windows. I booted from the Windows CD and installed Windows on the second partition. I am now unable to boot into Ubuntu and I do not have a boot menu at start-up to choose what OS I want. I went back in with my Ubuntu CD and selected the "bootable" option for both partitions through Disk Utility but it still boots only to Windows. If I change the Linux partition to "bootable" and deselect that option from the NTFS partition, my computer starts up and then give the error, "No operating system present." What do I have to do in order to have a boot menu show up that will allow me to choose what OS to use at start-up?
My brother installed ubuntu earlier this year, ended up not liking it, and somehow managed to delete all the Ubuntu folders from Windows XP without deleting neither the partition nor GRUB (which is what I'm assuming is keeping up the dual boot screens).
Info: Dual boot - windows xp (SP3) and ubuntu Laptop - Dell Vostro 1510
How do I get rid of the dual boot screen? AND how do I get rid of the partitions? I already tried to run Mbr fixer, but it hasn't worked. When I boot from the Windows XP CD I have, the recovery console doesn't detect the hard drive and therefore can't repair windows. I have the latest version of Kubuntu on hand - will installing this alongside or inside Windows XP wipe out the Ubuntu partitions or will it just create more partitions in the disk?
i've fedora 15 & windows vista installed on hard disk partitions.i can access windows files from fedora but how to view fedora files when i'm working on windows???
I have a dual boot system 9.10 and XP. The hard drive is 234. For some reason during the install I only allocated 128 to windows and 16 to ubuntu. Or at least, gparted tells me I have 127.99 NTFS and 104 unallocated (=231G ??).
System monitor tells me I have the following: /dev/loop0 is ext4 = 16 G total /dec/sda1 is host = 128 G total this is 134G total
From windows, the partitioner tells me the same. I have 104 of unallocated disk space and 128 of NTFS. I assume the 16G allocated to ubuntu is inside the 128G?. How do I get that additional 104 into ubuntu without screwing up the MFT of windows. Or can I? Is it as simple as telling gparted to format the space? or will that mess windows up?
So I wanted to dual boot Ubuntu with Windows 7, but have no idea how to partition out Ubuntu. At the moment, I'm working with a 300GB harddrive that will solely hold installed applications and stuff like that. Any shared/storage data will be put on separate harddrives altogether.
I plan on using a 40-50GB partition for Windows 7 alone (no installed applications and stuff). And here come the questions about Ubuntu partitioning. From what I read, do I only need three separate partitions? (/, /home, /swap) Even then I'm not 100% sure what each of these partitions represent. But my research says... / = equivalent to my Windows 7 partition, /home = the partition where installed applications go and other non-essential Ubuntu stuff, /swap = virtual memory
With all that said, to comfortably run Ubuntu can I have my partitions be these sizes?
/ = 10GB /home = 20-30GB /swap = 2GB (Do I even need this if I have 2GB of ram?) Windows 7 = 40-50GB W7 Apps = remaining space
I don't know what exactly I want to do with Ubuntu, but is a /home of 20-30GB adequate to install lot's and lot's of apps?
Setting up an old machine for some family members that are not so tech savvy. It will dual boot Windows XP and Ubuntu 10.04. The partitioning is as follows:
