Feedback on EasyBCD 2.0.0.67 and W7/XP/Ubuntu triple boot

davidc33

New Member
Hello,

Just wanted to provide a little feedback about my experience with EasyBCD Beta 2.0.0.67. I recently added Windows 7 to a system that already was dual-booting XP and Ubuntu using legacy Grub (version .97).

Before Windows 7, my single hard drive had 1 primary, and 7 extended partions (3 NTFS, and 4 Linux ext3). For Windows 7, I added a second primary partition using Norton Partition Magic, and installed W7 to that. As expected, the W7 installer took over the MBR, recognized my XP installation, and ignored the Linux partitions. After installing EasyBCD, I followed the link to the documentation about Linux: http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Linux. I found this to be an excellent and most helpful document. Within about 30 minutes, with the help of your documentation and EasyBCD, I had recovered the ability to boot Ubuntu, and now am able to boot all three operating systems with the W7 boot loader! I think it would have taking me less that 15 minutes, were it not for a couple of small wrinkles in the documentation:

1) Under "Installing GRUB", the document suggests doing a "find /boot/grub/stage1". That did not produce any results, but "find /grub/stage1" did. I believe this may be because I created /boot in it's own partition. This is probably a common configuration, so it might be worth mentioning. The document did suggest variations though, and that's what encouraged me to try "/grub/stage1".

2) The result of the GRUB find command was (hd0,7). So I setup GRUB in that partition - no problem. Then I rebooted W7 and followed the instructions under "Back in Windows Vista". Step 3 of that procedure ("Choose the correct drive and parition...") states that "it should be the same as the one we just finished configuring", which in my case was (hd0,7). I tried creating a Linux Legacy Grub entry to boot from Partition 7 as listed in EasyBCD. This did not work. When I tried to boot Ubuntu, I just got a cryptic error. So, I thought, hmm, Grub numbers from 0, EasyBCD is numbering from 1, so I probably want Partition 8. I tried that, and it failed in the same way. Then I just happen to remember something I read about GRUB. Though it does number paritions starting at 0, it always skips to 4 for the first extended paritition. So (hd0, 7) in Grub represents the 4th extended partition. In EasyBCD, this is Partition 6 (since I have 2 primary parititions, and EasyBCD numbers from 1 sequencialy). So the third time was the charm. But it would have been helpful if the document explained the differences in parition numbering schemes between legacy Grub and EasyBCD. I just happend to know about the GRUB conventions.

Thanks again for a great product,
David
 
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