(SOLVED!) Dual Boot with Windows (XP, Vista, 7)

For those wondering, dual boot was really easy for me. I added Elive Gem to my once full hard-drive (all the space was taken by my windows xp install).

Note: Before this step you should defrag your partition. Run 2 or 3 times the windows defrag utility for best results.

1) I resized my windows partition (NTFS). Basically I used Linux System Rescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org/Download) and used GParted (type startx Then right-clic on the desktop and choose GParted). Just resize your NTFS partition (make the changes and clic apply) and wait. Then close all this and you're ready to install Elive.

2) Booted the Elive cd, clicked the install icon.

3) Partitionning: I created a linux-swap and a root ( / ) partitions. (I could have added the /boot but I'm lazy).

4) Installed Grub on the MBR (first option)

5) Rebooted after install I can see which OS I want to boot, and both work fine.

I'm glad it was this easy.

I have tried multiple times to install Elive to dual boot with Windows XP, but when I boot the computer, I have no GRUB menu upon boot up and it goes directly to XP. I have been playing around with several LINUX distros and have not had this problem with any others.
On my primary hd I have a partition for XP, then an extended partition of which one part is for Elve "/" and one for swap.

I have tried installing GRUB to the MBR, which normally works with the other distros I've dual booted with. I have also tried to install GRUB to the partition which Elive is installed on.

What am I doing wrong?

Another problem is, how can I search for files in Elive? I ask because even after installation, when I boot off the Elive cd, the menu.lst file is not located in /boot/grub

Thanks for the help

If I'm not mistaken the partition should be primary, *NOT* extended.

See my post about dual boot with XP. I installed on the MBR, and just as you expected, everything went really smooth.

HTH

Thank you! The extended partition was the problem.

Also, is there a way to search for files in the Thunar file manager program?

nope thunar does not support search

Anyone had success with installing Elive as a duel-boot with Win Vista? I have a new Dell Laptop (Vostro 1700). Really NEED to have my Elive but don't want to hose it as it belongs to work and not mine.
So if anyone has installed Elive onto a Vista machine, please let me know how ya did it

Thanks

I can't imagine this would be any different from Debian based dual install. I have instructions at my site for dual booting Ubuntu (Debian) with Vista, but the setup should be exactly the same using grub as boot manager.

Shout back if you need more guidance.
Instructions here:
[www.commonmancomputing.com]

G'day there Detox,

I can confirm graffen's supposition. I just installed Elive as a dual boot on my laptop about a week ago. Installed totally painlessly first go.

I loaded Grub into the MBR, but I had to modify the menu.lst by hand as my machine has the Vista reinstall thingy saved to a FAT32 hd. I guess the vendor thought that was cheaper than supplying Vista CDs <shrug>.

Be that as it may, you should have no problems whatsoever installing Elive in a dual boot.

See ya
Ken
Qld, Australia

Newbie warning

I just installed Elive Gem on my notebook.

Before installing I had a working Grub Dual Boot to select my XP and gOS (Ubuntu) partitions.

I installed Elive on the old Ubuntu partiotion (i hope..).

Now the new Elive-Grub starts fine, but there is no option to boot into XP.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Sorry, Guys...

I think I must have installed it over my Windows partition instead of the Ubuntu

Argl, Sorry for you...

Thanks, Phoenix.

It's going to be a late night....

Viking,

I am sorry this is so late, but if you look for a rescue disk with the 'testdisk' software on it you should be able to recover. I have used testdisk to recover for several newbies in the past.

It is time consuming and you should carefully consider what you're doing before you enable it.

I downloaded and got elive gem 1.0 installed. When booting the options for the grub comes up

Elive gem 1.0
Microsoft Windows Xp
Ram test

I can boot into Elive with no problems but when I try to boot into windows it says

grub error (hd1,0) file system unknown

and won't boot into windows at all. I have Elive Gem installed on one hard drive and Windows on a different hard drive. How can I fix this so it dual boots correctly? Thanks for any help on this matter

You need to put the following in your /boot/grub/menu.lst
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Your rootnoverify might be different (hd1,1) or something else like that.

Hi,
I am trying to install XP and Elive on the same machine.
I then installed XP on the ntfs partition, and here is where the problem starts. XP must have deleted the MBR so elive can't load grub.

OK, I popped the elive cd back in and started another installation. The first step is to install grub (onto the MBR), after which I quit the installer. Now I can boot elive but not XP!

*[ps this mesage is 2 years old]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/23/2010 02:39AM by anu.

Thanks for the help but I tried what you suggested and its still not working. I tried

rootnoverify (hd0,1)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
rootnoverify (hd1,1)

none of them worked. Didn't get the file system unknown error but still didn't boot to windows at all. It just hung on a black screen with what ever rootnoverify i had tried,makeactive,chainloader +1 written on top of the screen.

I don't know why this thing didn't carry the next lines...
I hope you didn't put everything in one line. Keep trying to see where your XP boot is on your hd function.

Hi y_farkash,

you must install at first WinXP (if it is, then, leave it as it is) and than elive because the grub see the winxp install and set the kernel path



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/23/2010 02:37AM by anu.

First,I'd like to say that I'm a total newbie when it comes to linux,but a ferm believer in learning by doing
Back to my problem:I've installed Elive on a logical partition inside an extended partition of my C: drive(drive G,did the usual partitioning process of swap,root(ext3),home(ext3),made sure i don't screw up and install something in the wrong place,installed GRUB on the MBR,waited for the installer to give the ok ,rebooted and...
Crap.NTLDR is missing,press ALT,CTRL,DEL to reboot.
My goal was to create a dual boot with XP now I can't boot nothing,and I'm writing this from the live cd
I can probably fix the problem of booting to xp(I hope),my question are:
WHAT DID I DO WRONG?
DID I DO SOMETHING WRONG?
WHAT IS THE RIGHT WAY OF DOING IT?
any help is appreciated.Thank you.

Update:fixed the boot problem.
I was able to boot to xp using a boot usb drive and managed to fix the boot sequence,deleted the Elive partition ,and now I'm stuck again with my XPensive(thank god is working)system.
I still don't get the problem.I had a dual boot with Ubuntu and XP once,another with OpenGeo&XP and never had this problem.The GRUB was installed to the MBR and worked perfectly.Can not risk trying to install Elive again till I figure out what went wrong.Ideas anyone?Anybody else ever had this problem?

I split my drive in half.On one partition I loaded Windows XP on the other Elive.When I restarted there was no boot menu for XP just straight in to Elive.How do I set up a dual boot.
fminmexico.

Edit your menu.lst in /boot/grub to anable the dual boot with windows os.

See the example into the file

Bye

I have installed Elive and after I decided to add on a separate hard disk windows 7. The Grub file of Elive doesn't see windows. To start Elive I need to change the Bios and select the disk where is installed Elive and to start Windows I have to do the same.
Can somebody tell me is there is a way (a program or a command) to make recognize windows to grub?
Thank you for the help.
Luciano

Hello all and just want to say what a great OS!! I only have a few problems:
1. After I installed Elive to my HD, I noticed that my Vista partition is not recognized during initial boot-up, in essence, not giving me the option to select which OS I a can boot. I have partitioned the drive, and verified it's parameters via gparted, but it goes straight into Elive without the option. Just wondering if there is a GRUB issue there, or whatever. I do use Vista for certain things that I can't live without at the moment. As soon as those issues are resolved, I am trashing the Vista partition as soon as possible!!! GO OPEN-SOURCE!!!
2. My external HDD is not recognized by Elive at all!!! I have a 1TB WD drive that has a LOT of files and movies on it, but Elive doesn't acknowledge the drive when I plug it in. Just wondering if the drive is incompatible with Linux or Elive.
3. My Samsung mobile phone has a micro sd card that isn't recognized either. Just wondering if THAT has an incompatibility as well.
Just looking for some insight on problem #1 primarily. If I can get through that, then the other two are immaterial. Looking forward to any help possible, thanks!!!

Also, I found this forum and wondering if this will help fix my boot issue.
[forums.pcper.com]
Read post #10, written by "saikee"
Not even sure how to go about getting to where they are talking about Grub's menu.lst (kinda new at the Linux Command-Line Interface).

Yes,you should try to edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst file and add these lines:
title Windows Vista
root (hd0,x) #here set your Vista's partition number starting from 0
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

Procesor Intel Ci3-2100 3.10Ghz,64bit,3MB BOX,
4GB RAM DDR3 1333mhz,
NVIDIA GeForce 210,1GB DDR3,PCI-E,
Linux user:#492560,E17-Ecomorph user.
"This is Linux land!In silent nights you can hear Windows machines rebooting!..."
[www.youtube.com] [stanca-ultimateeditionromania.blogspot.com]#



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/18/2010 05:10AM by stanca.

Add your Windows 7's entry in the Elive's /boot/grub/menu.lst file.
[ubuntuforums.org]

Procesor Intel Ci3-2100 3.10Ghz,64bit,3MB BOX,
4GB RAM DDR3 1333mhz,
NVIDIA GeForce 210,1GB DDR3,PCI-E,
Linux user:#492560,E17-Ecomorph user.
"This is Linux land!In silent nights you can hear Windows machines rebooting!..."
[www.youtube.com] [stanca-ultimateeditionromania.blogspot.com]#



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/18/2010 05:23AM by stanca.

Cool, but how do I get to that line? Do I need to be logged in as administrator? Like I said before, I am kinda new to Linux's command-line interface, but I can get there with a little help.

In Linux you need always to be root in the most important things.
You could open the terminal and:

su
password
scite /boot/grub/menu.lst

or open Thunar,the file manager,right-click into it and choose "Admin Mode" and then you can go to the menu.lst file from filesystem>boot>grub directory and edit it,save and close.

Procesor Intel Ci3-2100 3.10Ghz,64bit,3MB BOX,
4GB RAM DDR3 1333mhz,
NVIDIA GeForce 210,1GB DDR3,PCI-E,
Linux user:#492560,E17-Ecomorph user.
"This is Linux land!In silent nights you can hear Windows machines rebooting!..."
[www.youtube.com] [stanca-ultimateeditionromania.blogspot.com]#

Thanks a lot!! Should the code for my Vista partition look something like this:?

title Windows Vista
root (hd0,2)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

OR...

title Windows Vista
root (hd0,x) #/dev/sda2
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

Thanks again for the support!!

Stanca,
I figured out which code works. But, I have another issue, it seems that GRUB doesn't recognize the ntfs file system as being a valid one. I am not sure what is going on here, but I really do still need a working Vista machine right now (unfortunately). So I will try one other option using the above mentioned code, but I am not sure it will work.

Great news!! I figured out that I was entering the wrong partition number from the beginning!! Got it working beautifully now -NO WORRIES and thanks for all the help!! Now if I can just get my wallpaper sized, I'll be a LOT better!!

Did you get your external HDD working?

If not open the partition editor (applications/administration/partition editor) to see if gparted finds the drive, if so then Elive not finding the drive may be the most common of things like
1: usb cable not connected properly
or
2: partition is formated with exFAT (64bit FAT) which I don't think is properly supported yet by Linux but is under development. Basically exFAT is a MS file system that uses the normal FAT system but instead of allowing only a maximum file size of 4gig as with FAT32 exFAT or FAT64 allows up to 64zebibyte (in plain English a very very very large file size)

@leanmoha,
Hey I actually got it to recognize the drive today I am not sure what I did or did not do at first, but it's reading it for now!!! Thanks for the help though.

no problem....it probably was not released properly by windows.

Hi My user name is hobocaver, my laptop is a touchy Toshiba Satellite A305. I am about Elive Topaz because it picked up everything from sound card to wireless to, best of all, my new 3G modem. I was running Simply Mepis, I liked it but the updates kept killing things. Does Elive give me the option to pass on updates, if all works as I like? My only issue with Elive was my doing; I was not paying attention during install and have no idea of who my root account is or it's password. I created a new user and can get root that way so far. Any ideas, please!

hobocaver Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hi My user name is hobocaver, my laptop is a
> touchy Toshiba Satellite A305. I am about
> Elive Topaz because it picked up everything from
> sound card to wireless to, best of all, my new 3G
> modem. I was running Simply Mepis, I liked it but
> the updates kept killing things. Does Elive give
> me the option to pass on updates, if all works as
> I like? My only issue with Elive was my doing; I
> was not paying attention during install and have
> no idea of who my root account is or it's
> password. I created a new user and can get root
> that way so far. Any ideas, please!


yeahp Elive is probably one of the best thing that has happened to Linux in a long time especially if coming from a Mac background. Just my humble opinion tho...lol!
Re: your question about updates.

Elive never updates itself automatically from my knowledge. This can be a bad thing but it is equally a good thing because I remember once updating ubuntu automatically and it failed to boot.

With Elive, you can update things from "synaptic" but really once you have everything setup the way you want and with the software you want you never need to go into synaptic unless you want to.

Komputor Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Great news!! I figured out that I was entering
> the wrong partition number from the beginning!!
> Got it working beautifully now -NO WORRIES and
> thanks for all the help!! Now if I can just
> get my wallpaper sized, I'll be a LOT better!!


I'm glad you got it working Komputor,it was only a matter of time untill you figured it out all by yourself.
Now you can enjoy your first dual-boot.See you next time when you'll need your first triboot/multiboot.

Procesor Intel Ci3-2100 3.10Ghz,64bit,3MB BOX,
4GB RAM DDR3 1333mhz,
NVIDIA GeForce 210,1GB DDR3,PCI-E,
Linux user:#492560,E17-Ecomorph user.
"This is Linux land!In silent nights you can hear Windows machines rebooting!..."
[www.youtube.com] [stanca-ultimateeditionromania.blogspot.com]#

@stanca;

Hahaha!! Lol, I can't really see the need to go that far yet, but when I do (and it's only a matter of time) I will be sure to stop in here to see you FIRST!!! Thanks for the help again!!

Same thing I was saying to the beginning,almost 2 years ago,and now I'm quad-booting already.

Procesor Intel Ci3-2100 3.10Ghz,64bit,3MB BOX,
4GB RAM DDR3 1333mhz,
NVIDIA GeForce 210,1GB DDR3,PCI-E,
Linux user:#492560,E17-Ecomorph user.
"This is Linux land!In silent nights you can hear Windows machines rebooting!..."
[www.youtube.com] [stanca-ultimateeditionromania.blogspot.com]#

WOW!!! stanca quad-booting!!! You developing an AI universe on that machine of yours

Thanks for the reply. I use internet sporadically, so my answers are slower. I spent the day yesterday putting programs into Elive, and now, thanks to your input, can leave it alone for a while. It works fantastically and fast.

Hello. I have been trying different distros for awhile. Had tried Elive 1 and liked what I saw but it just didnt get it for me, but Topaz is wonderful so far and it is all I use but....... I need vista for some things and I am trying to edit the menu.ist1 filebut it wont let me save. Wants to know if I want to save under a different name. What do I do???

Matt,
If all you are trying to accomplish is getting Elive to recognize your Vista partition, then all you need to do is follow the link in my second post above. Then follow the help that Stanca gave here also. If you need a little more help, or where to find the menu.lst, you can use the file system explorer in Elive and it will save the additions just as if you had written them in the command-line. Note that you MUST have the correct administrator password in order to edit any file in the filesystem and correctly save it. If you misplaced this password, it is EXTREMELY hard to reset it without doing a clean re-install. If this helps, let me know, and good luck! I have been using Elive Topaz for a while now and hardly have to go back to Vista -ONLY when I absolutley need to!!!

-Komputor

Ok. I am in the file ' boot/grub/menu.lst' and I have add the lines like saikee's post but when I try to save it it wont let me under that name it wants to know if I want to save under a different name. Sorry I just dont understand. I believe I am logged in as an admin.

Got me on this one. The only thing I can think of is you may not be logged in as an administrator, or you presented the wrong password when you accessed the file. Do you know the admin p/w? If so, log out completely, and log back in as the administrator. This may tweak certain graphical settings in the shell, but not much. Next, try the same process (still logged in as admin) and report back. It really helps to know if you have (or not) forgotten the admin p/w. If that doesn't work, try to re-install. Other than that, NO idea. Hope this helps.

Ok I do know my password, but I guess I dont know how to login as administrator

Matt, well I guess you can't "login" as an administrator, but you should be able to open the menu.lst file, add the lines at the END of the document, then save it and reboot. Are you prompted for a password at any time when you access the file? Try opening the file with another text editor; something that can save your changes in ASCII format. I know Unix uses vi editor, among others. See what you can find, it may help.

-Komputor
2007 Toshiba Satellite LS
Dual Boot Vista / Elive 2.0

Everything is possible, just put your mind to it!

If you right click the boot file, select "admin mode", you will be able to edit and save the document as you need it to do. Here is where you need your admin p/w!!! Good luck.

-Komputor
2007 Toshiba Satellite LS
Dual Boot Vista / Elive 2.0

Everything is possible, just put your mind to it!

Ok. That got me to where I needed to be. Just have to get the right command.

Did that work for you?

-Komputor
2007 Toshiba Satellite LS
Dual Boot Vista / Elive 2.0

Everything is possible, just put your mind to it!

I am there but just cant seem to get the command right. Have tried all examples in this forum

Ok, Firstly before you downloaded and installed Elive, did you partition and format your drive so that Vista and all of your files wouldn't be harmed?

If so, good. For some reason when you install Elive, it becomes the primary OS. Next check what partition Vista still runs on. To do this, open your Gparted and verify the partitions that are formatted with ntfs file system. Next, write that partition number down and that's the number in the code you need to enter.

In my case, the code that I needed looked like this:

title Windows Vista
root (hd0,2)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

The second line in the code is the one that makes or breaks it. For me, hd0,1 identified that hard disk 0, partition 1 contained the Vista OS.

After I tracked down the right partition number, I simply went to the menu.lst file (in admin mode), updated the code, and saved the file, rebooted, and all was right with the world! I then had an option to boot Vista from the Elive login screen!

Let me know if this helps.

-Komputor
2007 Toshiba Satellite LS
Dual Boot Vista / Elive 2.0

Everything is possible, just put your mind to it!

Using USB Live:
With the Installer I have gone as far as formatting my hard drive to Linux Swap (40gb D drive, other drive is 60 GB (Windows XP).
Bailed out of the install at this stage as I was not sure if by installing Elive on (D) with Windows on (C) that I would still be able to boot windows XP at start up.
Have I formatted the (D) correctly -and will I still be able to dual boot XP.
Cheers Rasta



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 12/23/2010 04:33AM by anu.

Oh yes ^^" Hello Everyone