Dual Boot Triple Boot Windows 7, Ubuntu 9.10 and XP

As you probably know by now, Win 7 doesn’t use the boot.ini file like previous versions of Windows.

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All three OS’s insist on taking over the mbr boot process.  If you always reloaded all three OS’s in the order of oldest Win first, the next oldest Win, then newest Win, and finally Ubuntu with grub preferably on fd0=floppy (because hd0=Hard Drive has traditionally been prone to failure at some point).

The problem quickly arises when you need to reload one of the OS’s.  If you go out of  “order”, then the last one takes over the mbr boot up and may or may not see one or more of the others.

This is unacceptable.

Supposedly you can edit the boot sequence on the Windows 7 side with \Windows\System32\bcdedit.exe

My experience was that I get “access denied” even when I am in Administrator mode.   There is also a bcdboot.exe  My experience so far is a big fat fail on this one.

Boot.ini will show the partition for the XP (and older Win versions) but that doesn’t help with Win 7 or the others.

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I found a freeware from @neosmart (on twitter) http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1 called EasyBCD Ver 1.7.2

After repairing my lost Win 7 using the Win 7 CD, I ran EasyBCD on the Win 7 side and did “add entry” to find the XP pro partition.

OR

Another time the Win 7 CD Repair saw the Win  7 ntfs, but still didnt fix the mbr and I was still stuck booting to XP only.

In this case, I still installed EasyBCD Ver 1.7.2, but it had errors when I tried to run it on this XP pro SP2.

To get rid of the Easy BCD errors, I had to download and install “MS Installer Ver 3.1, and then install dotNET Ver 2.0 SP1  (in one place I saw that you might have to also install the dotNET Ver 2.0 SP2)

At any rate, EasyBCD once again saw the Win7, and I had to add the XP entry and let it “Make MBR” and on reboot, all was well again.

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I used Sun Virtual Box (free) and loaded Ubuntu 9.10 into a pre-formatted ntfs partition.  This is a slower work-around solution til they get the MANDATORY Grub2 tuned better.  http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

More to come on this as it develops…

Windows 7 RC1 Build 7100

You can download it free til August 20, 2009

**** Annoying bi-hourly time outs from Mar 1, 2010 til June 01.2010 phase out of the RC trial – Time to buy or move on soon.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd353205.aspx

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Per Microsoft, here is what you need to have for the PC:

“Here’s what you need to have:

• Internet access (to download Windows 7 RC and get updates)
• A PC with these minimum recommended specifications:
  – 1 GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor or higher
  – 1 GB of system memory or more
  – 16 GB of available disk space
  – Support for DirectX 9 graphics with 128 MB memory (to enable the Aero theme)
  – DVD-R/W Drive”

*** I wanted to keep using FAT 32 but you MUST use NTFS on this partition to install to.

My desktop PC is a 1.4 Ghz AMD +1700 32bit with 750 Meg Ram and I loaded it into a 8.36Gig partition as 1 of 3 Win versions in this triple boot machine.

The actual minimum footprint was 6.57 Gig in my install of Win 7 RC1 Build 7100.  I have restore points turned off.  Im sure with all possible feaures on and updates that you quickly get to the 16Gig that they require.

I was NOT able to put this on an old laptop because this old Compaq Presario 1255 only has only 168 Meg of ram.

The Win7 32bit RC1 Build 7100 .iso is 2,471,656 bytes (2.4 Gig)

“Normaly” I would “burn image” of this iso on my lite-on DVD burner, which extracts and burns the contained files to a DVD+R in this case.  Although my burns of DVD’s seemed good on my HP DVD+R media, they all got about halfway through the Win 7 install and had the following error:

“Windows cannot install required files.  The file maybe be corrupt or missing>.. Error code 0x80070017

This was evidently a common error in loading Vista too.

All I could find was recommendations to go with x1 or x2 speed and use DVD-R media (maybe Verbatim brand).  I didnt have that handy… so now what…

First off, i had to reformat my G: drive everytime as NTFS.

I used Undisker to extract the .iso to the XP (F:\) partition and then after booting into XP, I ran setup for Win 7 from there.  The “size on disk” of the files was2.37 GB (2,551,152,640 bytes).  This avoided a need to buy DVD-R disks.

*** You MUST also have about 990 Meg of free C:\ partition disk space although the Microsoft popup claims to only need 680Meg. Trust me, you get crashes partway through if you dont have enough C:\ space for installation files.

After about an hour of error free install time, I was trying out Win 7 RC1.

This free release candidate is supposed to be ok til March 01, 2010.  After that you can only use it a few hours at a time and then not at all after June 2010.  See microsoft site for details and any changes/clarifications to their offer.

*** I recently heard from someone that used DVD-R disk and used PowerISO for the burn and that worked too.