Dual booting Fedora and Win7

[Jussi Lehtola]

On Tue, 2009-11-03 at 18:41 -0500, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> I'm putting Win7 on a machine for testing on a project, on bare iron instead of 
> a VM. Since I hate to waste a machine for 60-90 minutes a week of test, I want 
> to mix with Fedora. I asked a month or so ago, and got some thoughts about 
> adding Win7 to an existing Fedora machine, from people who hadn't done it (Win7 
> wasn't out yet).
> 
> After a slew of install issues, a clean install was done and the Win7 worked. 
> Now to boot Fedora using the "Windows boot manager." No, that doesn't work, 
> checked that the grub-install had been in the OS partition rather than the MBR, 
> still no boot.
> 
> Reinstall Fedora, still doesn't boot from WBM.
> 
> Run grub-install into MBR, boot into Fedora, add chain load to grub.conf, 
> reboot. Win7 is in the boot menu, but say "unknown executable" instead of 
> booting. Reinstall Win7 again, run project required tests.
> 
> Hopefully at some time will be able to put Win7 in grub menu.

I had no trouble getting Win7 booted with grub, it worked as with every
other Windows I have dealt with.

Note, however, that at least in my case fdisk reports 
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1          13      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2              13       10449    83824640    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3   *       10449       10475      204800   83  Linux
(+ an extended partition which contains /, /home and swap)


These were created by the Windows install upon partitioning. I only gave
some 80GB of disk for Windows and it created two partitions: /dev/sda1
(the Windows boot partition) and /dev/sda2 (the Windows system
partition). My grub.conf states

title Windows 7
	rootnoverify (hd0,0)
	chainloader +1

so you need to use the Windows boot partition, not the Windows system
partition for the chailoader to work. My grub is (naturally) in the MBR.
-- 
Jussi Lehtola
Fedora Project Contributor
jussilehtola at fedoraproject.org