Advice needed

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wabe

Member
My daughter has a laptop shipped with Win Vista. She has installed Ubuntu herself on this machine and it dualboots with Ubuntu as default. The disk was shipped with just one partition so I guess Ubuntu "took" some of the free space when it was installed.

I'm going to help her upgrade Vista to Win 7 (upgrade no fresh install).

What's the best way to go about this process so Ubuntu still boots after the upgrade?

I've installed EasyBCD in Vista and running it indicates that the Vista bootloader is used. I cannot see any sign of Ubuntu in EasyBCD however??
 
You should find that the Linux partition is "active" and that the MBR has been overwritten to look for grub, not bootmgr.
Grub will still chain back to the Vista bootmgr. It hasn't gone away, it's just not in charge any more.
You can "reinstall the Vista/7 boot loader" from EasyBCD if you want to put it back in charge.
You'll then need to add a Linux entry to the BCD. Whether to choose grub or grub2 when you do so depends on which Ubuntu version was installed.
 
Latest Ubuntu-version x32 is installed. I suppose this means 'grub2'?
Would booting into Windows Vista and then just upgrade be an option or would the win 7 upgrade do something to the boot sector?
 
Yes, grub2 is default if 10.4 was installed directly, but if (like me) you've reached 10.4 by successive upgrades from 8.x, you might still be on legacy grub. (If the linux \boot\grub folder contains menu.lst it's legacy. grub.cfg= grub2)
If you reinstate the Vista boot before you upgrade to W7, everything should be hunky dory, otherwise the upgrade would probably take control from grub, and you'd need to add an entry to the BCD afterwards to get Linux back as an option. Either way should be fine, it's just a case of adding a Linux entry to the BCD before or after the upgrade.
 
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