Trouble with W7 and Mepis dual boot on separate disks

casfindad

Member
Dear Easy BCD community,

I posted the following message on the Mepis forums, and so far I have not received a solution that works. If anyone hear can tell me how I can set up a W7/Mepis dual boot with the two OSs on separate drives, please let me know. At present, I just get the grub prompt when I try to boot. Thanks for your help.
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Dear mepistas,

On the advice of a couple people in the Mepis community, I'm trying to set up a Windows 7 and Mepis 11 dual boot using Easy BCD to control the boot process. Here is my setup, with the lettering corresponding to that used by the Mepis partition tool. (The BIOS reads the two 250 GB drives as sda and sdb, with the 1 TB drive as sdc.):

sdb = 250 GB drive with W7 on sdb2.
sdc = 250 GB drive with M11 / on sdc1 (primary), linuxswap on sdc5 (logical) and /home on sdc6 (logical). All these partitions were formatted as ext4
sda = 1 TB drive with a single logical partition to hold additional data (I created an extended partition, as I may want to create multiple partitions in the future.)

W7 was installed first, then M11. During the M11 installation, I installed grub to the root partition, with the initrd option checked.

I then rebooted into W7, and in Easy BCD added an entry for M11 using grub legacy (that's correct isn't it?), choosing the sdc1 partition, then checking "grub not loaded to MBR" as recommended on the Easy BCD forums, since W7 and M11 are on different drives.

When I rebooted and choose M11 in the Windows Boot Manager, I get the Mepis screen for choosing the kernel, then I get an error that the partition "root hd(2,0) cannot be mounted. Pressing any key brings me back to the grub boot menu.

I tried replacing the M11 entry in Easy BCD using one with Grub2 or unchecking the "not loaded to MBR" option, both to no avail. I also know that in the past some people reported Easy BCD having problems booting an ext4 formatted partition, but the latest version supposedly should have no problem with this.

Would an Easy BCD user please post step-by-step instructions for setting up a W7/M11 dual boot on separate drives? Easy BCD appeals to me because (in theory) it seems like an easy way to manage the boot process if you have multiple OSs, and I may want to install more than W7 and M11 in the future.

Alternatively, if I throw in the towel on Easy BCD, should I install grub to the MBR of sdb? Or do I write it to the MBR of sdc? It will be ok to use the Mepis installed grub if my OSs are on separate drives, won't it?

Thanks in advance for your help. This dual boot install has been a major headache.
 
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