? An easy way to Dual-boot Windows7 & Puppy with Grub4Dos ?

Booting, installing, newbie
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mikeslr
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? An easy way to Dual-boot Windows7 & Puppy with Grub4Dos ?

#1 Post by mikeslr »

Hi All,

I'm not exactly a beginner, but I have almost no experience with computers which come with Windows 7 installed. I've searched the Forum. Most of the posts regarding installation were written when it could be assumed that a computer had Windows XP installed and before Grub4Dos became the standard boot manager. [For those of you who haven't yet read the fine print, Grub4Dos is an acronym which confusingly, rather bizarrely, means “Grub not merely for Dos.
Last edited by mikeslr on Sat 31 Aug 2013, 23:54, edited 1 time in total.

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Monsie
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? An easy way to Dual-boot Windows7 & Puppy with Grub4Dos ?

#2 Post by Monsie »

mikeslr wrote:
Windows 7 does not respond positively when some other operating system resizes the hard-drive onto which it was installed
.

That hasn't been my experience. I triple boot Windows XP, Windows 7, and Debian on my main desktop. Windows 7 and Debian share equal space on one hard drive. Windows XP is on the other hard drive. I found the most important part of this task was the sequence for installing each operating system: Windows XP, then Windows 7, then Debian. For the second hard drive, I installed Windows 7 first, then used Gparted to resize the Windows partition and create a new partition formatted with ext4 for Debian. Then I installed Debian on the ext4 partition and let grub overwrite the master boot record. On boot-up grub recognizes both operating systems, and I either select Windows 7 or do nothing in which case Debian loads as the default operating system.... Aside: if I were to remove Debian, then I would have to use the Windows 7 disk to reset the master boot record to Windows specs in order to go Microsoft only...

If you use Gparted only to resize, repartition and format your hard drive, you should be able to save yourself a step. AFAIK, Windows cannot create and format an ext partition for you... The only issue that I have had with Gparted is that any ntfs formatted partitions it creates are not recognized by Windows --at least with my version, but maybe this is a bug in Gparted that has been fixed now. So, I would suggest not creating any new ntfs partitions on your hard drive as an afterthought.

Last, I realize this is not dual booting with Puppy, but my thoughts are that the procedure should be very similar if not the same.

Hope this helps,
Monsie
My [u]username[/u] is pronounced: "mun-see". Derived from my surname, it was my nickname throughout high school.

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mikeb
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#3 Post by mikeb »

Hmm a trick that worked for me on vista and seems to apply to 7 too as tested by others.

You mention grub4dos so I assume a little familiarity.....

7 does use an mbr (unless you are dealing with the efieblah stuff) but it loads bootmgr rather than ntldr.

Trick is to rename bootmgr to say bootmg7.
add a copy of grldr from grub4dos...rename it to bootmgr
Add a menu.lst with entry for puppy and chainloader /bootmg7

Done... you will get the grub menu...if windows chosen it will boot straight to that if only the one system.

Actual partition layouts vary a little..sometimes there is a small boot partition etc so the specific details will vary.

Want to return...just delete the pretend bootmgr and rename the original.

If no partitioning is done and puppy is added frugally (you can still have a swapfile I beliveve) this is the least intrusive and the system can be restored untouched....

mike

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James C
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#4 Post by James C »

Guess I'm just old school but ........
I have four boxes multi-booting Windows 7 and Linux with good old Legacy Grub and one using Grub4dos (purely for testing purposes).I resize the Windows partition with the Windows tools,use Puppy to create any ext3 or ext 4 and swap partitions, install Puppy and finally install Grub or Grub4dos to the mbr.
That's what works for me but I'd proceed however you feel more comfortable.

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mikeslr
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Thanks, but still concerned re Grub4Dos when only one HD

#5 Post by mikeslr »

Thanks, Monsi, for the tip. Now that you've clarified I recall that it was formatting as an ntfs drive rather than resizing that was warned against. I don't know if Windows 7 will do the same, but as I recall when I used gparted to resize an ntfs drive on which XP was installed, the next time I booted into XP it ran some kind of a check and, I think, rebuilt the partition table it used internally. I don't recall that happening when the "non-operating system" drives were resized.

But I still would like confirmation that it is safe to install Grub4Dos onto the only hard-drive. And, as a matter of curiosity, what actually happens vis-a-vis Window 7's default mechanism for booting?

mikesLr

PS: I was writing while mikeb and James C were posting. I guess they've answered my questions. I like James C's version for simplicity, but may follow mikeb's advice. It's no worse than the "Lin and Win" method I used when I first started with Puppy. And , as mikeb indicated, would make restoration easy should --for reasons I don't currently even have an inkling beyond the aesthetic value of not breaking things you can't fix-- I ever want.


---------
As only my mother called me "Michael", my "real world" name is Mike Kessler. But when you say it fast, one of the two ke's and the last e gets suppressed. I capitalized the L in signing after many on this forum mistook it for a 1.

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mikeb
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#6 Post by mikeb »

Yes its a bit like lin'n'win in reverse... I first tried it on someone else's machine so played the cautious card. I also added XP in the recovery partition as well as there was enough room in there :D

By the way I tried it after hearing the original trick of renaming grldr to ntldr....

The more conventional method which the win32 installer uses when we first played with adding vista and 7 to it runs the native windows bcdedit but it is a bit on the fiddly side... the result is more like the lin'n'win way as it simply adds an entry to boot grldr. Apart from simplicity the rename method does mean 'a windows straight from grub' operation.

mike

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Crash
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#7 Post by Crash »

I realize this thread is marked as "resolved", but there are several other things that I would like to mention:
mikeslr wrote:As almost none of them are offered with Window 7 installation disks, wiping out that installation would be for all intents and purposes be permanent.
I agree that the actual distribution disk is usually not supplied, but almost all new computers come with a method to create your own restore DVD. If the computer doesn't have an internal DVD writer, an external USB DVD drive can be bought for as little as $25. One of the first things that I do with a new computer is generate the factory restore disks. Then when all else goes wrong, you just push in the DVD and load a clean copy of everything. I did this for a neighbor's computer last week, and the restore program even wiped off the old data and re-partitioned the hard drive.

I also back up the entire contents of the hard drive to a spare hard drive if I am going to make significant changes to the computer. If you don't want to install a hard drive physically into the computer, you can get a hard drive and connect it to a USB adapter. This works fine. There are a number of free disk cloning programs out there. I happen to use one made by Macrium called Reflect, but there are others. I usually replace the original hard drive with the new one, so if everything goes wrong I just put the original hard drive back in.

I prefer using a frugal install of Puppy Linux when running it as a dual install with Windows. That way, I don't need to do any re-partitioning. I know there is plenty of debate on whether this is better than doing a full install on a separate partition, but it is the way that I am used to doing it.

Finally, Grub4DOS doesn't have to invade your MBR - it can just reside as two files on the root of your hard drive (grldr and grldr.mbr). Then you just have to either modify the boot.ini file (Windows XP) or modify the BCD file using BCDEDIT (Windows Vista and 7). Noryb009 wrote a program that automates the process:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 32&t=61404

I also wrote a similar program, although it isn't as popular and has drifted into obscurity:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 826#544826

A lot of work has been done in the past to make a dual Puppy Linux / Windows installation go as painless as possible. The problem is, the information gets lost over the years; thus this post to remind people.

P.S. I am writing this post from Puppy Linux on a computer that dual boots Puppy Linux / Windows 7 using the method I described above.

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