Dual Boot Win 7 and SUSE 42.6

BOOSTEDI5

BOOSTEDI5

Member
Hello, I was using Easy BCD without issues on my rig with Windows 7 and Suse 13.1. However, I didn't upgrade in time to get this distribution up to date and had to wipe it out. So, yesterday I spent a lot of time trying to get SUSE 42.6 to dual boot with my Windows 7. When I first set this up I didn't have any issues getting Easy BCD to see my SUSE load and load the Grub 2 I installed with the SUSE load.

Here's a screen shot showing where I loaded SUSE. I put it on my non-RAID drive. I also told it to load the GRUB 2 to this drive /dev/sdc

jR95ykR.png

2GB is swap, 40 GB is root and 155 is Home.

After that I tried every way imaginable to get Easy BCD to find the Grub I loaded but nothing I tried worked! It would just boot to a grub prompt every time. However, If I hit F8 on boot up and choose my WD640GB drive to boot off it immediately finds the SUSE Grub and proceeds to load SUSE without issues.

I also kept going into the Boot loaded in SUSE and trying to tell it to load Grub to different areas and nothing worked. The last time I did this it required changing the boot order in the Boot loader in SUSE to have my /dev/sdc drive listed at the TOP in the boot order. This worked last time with Easy BCD so I don't know what I'm doing wrong? I even went from 2.2 to 2.3 and tried again.

So, I wanted to know if I can simply remove Easy BCD or possibly get Easy BCD to work with this? I'm concerned if I remove Easy BCD I won't be able to boot my System up. When I removed the Win7 from the boot loader menu in Easy BCD it warned me this will make my PC not boot. So, I want to know how I can possibly get this working or remove Easy BCD from my computer?
 
Hello, I wanted to say I received an email a few weeks back from Mahmoud. He didn't say if removing this software will cause my computer not to boot up but I'm assuming once I remove this software I will probably be greeted with the NO OS found message or something along those lines. He recommended Easy Recovery Essentials if I encounter problems.< Nenvermind, they want money for this! I can find plenty of FREE recovery utilities. I am going to download that now and I also have other boot recovery utilities on stand-by in case of issues. I'm not sure what happened but Easy BCD appears to not be able to handle the exact same dual boot setup I had with Suse 13.x and Win7. I loaded Suse 42.6 the exact same way as 13.x and loaded Grub in the same spot. So, I'm hoping once I get Easy BCD removed I can dual boot through GRUB menu without issues.
 
EasyBCD is not a boot manager.
It's a utility to help you manage the contents of Microsoft bootmgr's data store, the BCD.
Whether you install or uninstall EasyBCD makes absolutely no difference to your system.
It's only running it from inside Windows and asking it to change something that could affect your system (not immediately, but next time you boot).
Between released builds it's obviously a static piece of software, so if you change Linux distros and what you did in EasyBCD before, with an earlier version no longer works, then something radical must have changed in the Linux distro which is not coded in EasyBCD.
Whatever that might be is beyond my ken, having stopped using Linux many years ago whilst still in the legacy grub era, but I imagine it will need to be addressed by Mahmoud diagnosing the altered situation and coding around it in a future build.
Mahmoud is pretty with-it but I doubt even he can presciently code for all future design change whims of each of the many Linux distros out there.
EasyRE is a linux based OS with multiple recovery options for broken OSs, but it's not necessary for any W7 user unless he fails to make use of the inbuilt recovery disc option (Control Panel > Backup & Restore > Create recovery disc) before finding himself unable to boot his PC.
Nevertheless, it's there as an option for anyone who needs it and it comes with a money back guarantee if your system is not fixable.
 
Thanks for your reply and great information Terry. Here's what happened yesterday.

I managed to hose up my OS!!First, I simply removed EasyBCD and rebooted. It kept the boot info and booted right back to Windows. I was hoping it would find the GRUB for SUSE but it didn't. So, I re-installed EasyBCD and choose remove Win7 from the boot menu and then removed EasyBCD. I was pretty sure this might hose things UP and it did. I recall this software warning me the OS will not boot the last time I did this but I guess I was ready for trouble.

Upon rebooting I received the following message.

"Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem:
1. Insert your windows installation disc and restart your computer.
2. Choose your language settings, and then click "Next."
3. Click "Repair your computer."

If you do not have this disc, contact our system administator or computer manafacturer for assistence.

File: \Boot\BCD"

So, first I tried to see if the boot-repair-disk bootable CD I had would work to correct the boot sector/BCD issue. When I ran the boot repair software on that it just insisted on checking the sdc6 drive where it loaded GRUB to and would fail out with this error>

"Please enable a repository containing the [grub2] packages in the software sources of OpenSUSE 42.3" and wouldn't fix any boot sector issues.

So, I just used my Windows repair disk and followed the simple instructions above to recovery BCD for Windows. Now when I boot up Windows 7 it shows the menu as Recovered on the 10 second countdown to start the OS. No big deal and I'm glad I got Easy BCD removed and my OS recovered ok. I guess the important lesson is you can remove Easy BCD without issue but don't remove the OS it was managing.

The software worked great for my old dual boot SUSE setup but for whatever reason I could not get it to recognize the GRUB and give me the GRUB boot menu. It could have to do with the file system changes that took place between the older 12.x 13.x SUSE versions and the newer file systems I used on the 42.3 load. I'm using Btrfs for all my Linux partitions (I think) and the older SUSE load I had working were ext4 partitions.

Anyway, I ended up trying all sorts of options to reload GRUB to my main partition hoping it would take over the Windows boot manager but no matter what I tried the recovered Windows BCD remained intact. I just ended up changing the boot order of my disk drive is BIOS. I changed the WD640 GB drive in my picture above to be the primary boot drive. Now I don't have to hit F8 to select the drive in order to get the GRUB menu to come up. I could have done this with the Easy BCD software installed as well. I'm happy with my current solution and appreciate the support.
 
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Well that was a short lived solution. I realized changing the primary boot drive to my wd640(sdc) drive caused Windows not to be able to go into Hibernation mode. So, back to the drawing board. I think I might just skip SUSE for now. :expressionless:The only reason I like having Linux on my powerful system is seeing how fast it FLYS.
 
As I said, it's a (very) long time since I was a Linux user, but iirc, it was an option during install (right up front) where you chose whether to let Linux take control of the boot. Back then I think, it was the default action and one had to be careful not to let it go ahead if bootmgr was the preferred boot option. It's not a matter of where the Linux \boot partition is located, but the fact of Linux overwriting the MBR on the controlling disk, so that the MBR expects to find grub in the active partition.
 
I realize how the boot managers work. I typically let GRUB take over since it almost always finds the Windows OS and loads it to the GRUB menu. I was able to load GRUB on the older SUSE 12.x/13.x versions to my sdc (Western Digital 640GB) drive and still allow easyBCD to handle the boot process.

Since my Primary c drive for windows (sda) is where the Windows boot manager is located I can usually just load GRUB to that drive and it takes over the boot management. I'm not messing with this right now and happy with having a functional Windows machine. I'll get back to this later. Thanks
 
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