Dual boot - dual drive Win8Pro (HD) & Ubuntu 12.04 (SSD) questions

O

ocjoe

Member
Hello!

I'm having trouble getting dual boot setup with my system using 2 drives after having bought EasyBCD and iReboot. I've learned a lot in the last 72 hours but it's still not enough (product documentation and googling). I'm a software engineer but I've just never had to deal with modifying boot records before.

I've got an HP Quad Envy DV7 (64 bit) laptop that came with a 750GB drive. I've added a Vertex 4 SSD. I've turned off secure boot and set the bios to compatibility mode for OS installs. I already have my data backed up, I have my Win8 and Ubuntu 12.04 disks at hand. I can repartition and reinstall based on your recommendation.

So if you were sitting down with the disks and laptop in front of you, how would you go about getting Ubuntu on the second disk and an option in the Win8 boot menu (you know, the pretty blue one)?

I've already tried several times but can't boot to Ubuntu from the Windows boot menu. I forget the error exactly but it said something about \NST\???Neo???.mbr missing. I'm sure I'm missing something small. So I'm starting from scratch.
 
I've found some posts in other forums that say EasyBCD doesn't support UEFI but they are dated last year or earlier. Is that still true?
 
The latest EasyBCD supports UEFI inasmuch as it no longer causes problems the way earlier versions did when it first appeared.
However MS W8 boot manager doesn't support booting of "foreign" OSs from UEFI.
The only way to get the dual boot to work is to do it from grub.
 
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