Dual booting help

Ollie83 · 11 Feb 2010 at 18:19

My friend had a 500gb hard drive with Linux installed on it. He wanted to play a few games and had a few windows only programs he wanted to run so he decided to buy another 500gb hard drive and install windows 7 on it. I installed the hard drive without issue so he went on to install windows 7 on this second drive.

I was under the impression that to boot from one to the other would be a seamless and easy thing to do... Not so! I would like some one here to try and help explain the ins and outs of boot loading if possible. What we would like is either an option on start up to select the appropriate OS (ideally) or to first boot into Linux and have the option to restart into Windows 7.

Thanks

vanandjuanunited · 11 Feb 2010 at 18:23

why not just run them of one drive with two partitions?
Use the other disk for data storage etc

Ollie83 · 11 Feb 2010 at 18:29

I cant believe i didn't think of that.

vanandjuanunited · 11 Feb 2010 at 18:35

lots of handy guides available

Recently started dual booting win 7 and ubuntu

Ollie83 · 11 Feb 2010 at 18:36

Which guides did you refer too may i ask?

Lee · 11 Feb 2010 at 19:01

I dual boot Vista 64 with Ubuntu, however my installation was the reverse to the situation here. Installed Ubuntu after Vista. Ubuntu installs Grub, which manages the boot. It give a menu to select which OS to boot into. Try sorting Grub out using the the Super Grub bootable CD:

http://www.supergrubdisk.org/index.php?pid=5

Once done, install "Start up manager" in your Linux OS. This is a good GUI for changing Grub boot settings (defaults etc).