W7/F11 dual boot

P

Porrum_doctum

Member
Hi,

I have a Windows 7RC / Fedora 11 system installed, both taking two primary partitions on my laptop hard drive. When I power up, I get Grub. I find this odd, since I configured not to install to the mbr during Fedora install. (I used that option before with W7Beta/F10, where it left me without a bootloader). Grub leaves me the option F11, which boots nicely, and W7, which brings me to Bootmanager. There I have the choice W7, which boots nicely, and F11, which fails. That last failure is normal, since it still has old F10 settings in there. (Bootmanager was configured with EasyBCD for W7/F10 earlier, but I messed the F10 graphics up so I reinstalled with F11) Now for my actual problem, since both system are bootable.

1. I desperately want to get rid of the double bootloader thing.
2. I don't really care whether I'm left with Grub or Bootmanager, but I'd prefer Grub.
3. I would use EasyBCD and delete the F11 entry, leaving me with Grub pointing directly to either system, but I cannot run EasyBCD. It states "unable to access BCD store". I am assuming something messed up my BCD store.
4. I tried Windows repair, repair startup, which fails royally, as expected.
5. I tried "bootrec /fixmbr", which succeeds, but solves nothing.
6. I tried "bootrec /fixboot", which fails, stating something about not recognizing the filesystem.
7. I tried bcdedit, as explained in "Step Four, Nuclear Holocaust" somewhere on the NeoSmart pages. Bootsect works fine, but I cannot delete c:\boot\bcd because it is not there. Assuming that if it were not there it would be superfluous to delete, I tried skipping to the next steps. /createstore, /create and /store succeed, but /import fails. Reason "The volume does not contain a recognised filesystem".
8. I ran out of ideas and sources. Any suggestions would be welcome, I'm still hoping not having to reinstall. At this point I should probably accept that it would be quicker to do so, but I would prefer not having to install and configure all my default programs again. I did that already and it's boring.

I hope I posted in an acceptable section of the forum, if not, I apologise.

Thanks in advance!
 
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Hi Porrum, welcome to NST.
My guess is that your W7 partition is not the "active" primary.
The MBR will go to the bootsector of the "active" partition and look there for the PBR which in turn locates the boot manager. If F11 is "active" that explains grub being your primary boot manager.
If you want bootmgr to be in control, set W7 "active" and leave it so. Using EasyBCD 2.0 delete the old F10 entry and add a new entry for F11.
If you want grub to stay in control and just wish to clean up the BCD so that it has a single entry and doesn't display a menu, then set W7 "active" just for the sake of EasyBCD (It will try to locate the BCD using the "active" flag, which is probably why it's failing). Once you've successfully run EasyBCD and done your cleanup, set F11 "active" again.
 
Thanks Terry,

Changing the active partition allowed me to run EasyBCD and delete the Fedora entry. I am now finally happy with my boot sequence.

I had forgotten about active partitions, and windows computer manager isn't very good with them either apparently. After marking my windows boot partition as active, it did not allow me to reselect the linux partition. Had to use diskpart in a command window to be able to do so. I suppose it's okay that basic users are protected from their own ignorance that way, but again, it reinforced the "welcome to windows" feeling.

It could of course be that I missed it, but if I'm correct in thinking that active partitions and diskpart are not mentioned in the FAQ's on the pages here, it might be something interesting to add to them somewhere in the future.

Thanks again!
 
Yes it's typically egocentric of MS to ignore completely all other File Systems. If you're going to dual boot any combination which is not 100% Windows, it's a good idea to have a free bootable GPartEd CD in your toolbox. It's a quick way of setting flags that will recognize any FS, as long as you remember that Linux and Windows call some of the flags by different names.
 
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