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…

FYI – Heise Security in the UK has Windows Update Patch Disk for Download

I heard about this recently on SecurityNow with Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte. I havent done this yet and it’s strictly use at your own risk. It is available from Heise Security in the UK and is for download.

From what I have heard, it makes it possible to download a disk that would have Windows updates up to a certain date.

http://www.heise-security.co.uk/articles/80682

Why would you want this? If you have to setup machines from scratch. It supposedly will make it much easier to get the new install caught up to a certain date with the Windows patches.

Windows already has a Service Pack2 available and there is a Service Pack 3 that will contain as I understand it the patches since Service Pack 2. However, as I understand it, the Service Pack3 hasnt been available for download yet.

So, in the meantime, you might check this out.

Credit to Leo Laporte that has covered the tech and computer industry for many years and is probably most known for the Screen Savers tech shows on cable over the years. Leo has an awesome network of podcasts now including this one with Steve at twit.tv

http://twit.tv

Steve Gibson is the maker of Spinrite which may be able to help you recover a damaged hard drive or help it not get in a mess to start off with… and also famous for ShieldsUp and other utilities that help with computers and security.

http://www.grc.com

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