PROBLEM with triple booting (SL/Windows7/Ubuntu)

[Detosx]

 I was trying to think this one through. Perhaps the thing to do would be to install Ubuntu on another gpt hard drive and then use gparted to copy the partitions onto the triboot hard drive. As long as you aren't expanding or reducing those partitions, there apparently shouldn't be any data loss in Gparted. While I'm sure Ubuntu is overwriting mbr without being asked, I'm not quite convinced Ubuntu really is copying Grub to root when instructed to do so in the Advanced tab (?), so you would need to do it manually.

 

Someone called Thomas on Daily Blogged drew attention to someone on the Ubuntu forums called RCC2k7 who came up with a way to relocate Grub to root

 

Boot into Ubuntu

 

Launch Terminal.

 

Type df and press return/enter key

 

Note the first entry on the list – the one mounted as /. This is the one we want, let's say it's /dev/sda3.

 

Type sudo grub-install /dev/sda3 – replace /dev/sda3 with whatever pertains to your setup.

 

Enter your Password, press enter/return

 

Exit and close terminal

 

restart

 

fire up gparted, copy the partitions over and... hopefully, Chameleon will pick Grub... and hopefully the Windows partition will still boot.

 

Anyone like to try this? Looks like that's my Sunday breakfast.

[Detosx]

That didn't work. Copying the swap, root and home partitions over onto identically sized hfs+ partitions for some reason killed the Windows boot. I'm not sure why that happened.

 

One other point of minor intrest to note. If I use Gparted to label the hard drive gft, leave it blank and then use Ubuntu to make swap, root and home partitions, the Advanced tab, to select where you want to put Grub, doesn't work when selecting the root partition. Instead, I found I had to set up swap, root and home partitions in Gparted and then format them in Ubuntu, at which point the Advanced tab let me select and approve Grubs location without bother. Having selected root, Ubuntu wouldn't boot, just a cursor flashing on a black background, which suggests no mbr detail was in fact written by Ubuntu. Good to know, I suppose, but I don't feel I am making much progress. I only need this to work on my laptop as with the desktop I have the option of two or more hard drives.

 

The second drive with Ubuntu on it boots fine from the first drive, which has Chameleon on it. If I use Gparted to copy over to the first drive, Chameleon sees the Linux partition but won't boot it.

[Detosx]

I just made an interesting discovery. Installing Ubuntu fritzed the Windows boot, so I assumed though I had chosen to install Grub to root that Ubuntu was also, unasked, overwriting the... hybrid mbr that we are speaking of. You boot up from the Windows 7 DVD and it won't play ball, won't even get you to the repair screen (though interestingly if you use the Vista DVD, it does, but gets you no further). What I wondered was, what if I then boot from the retail snow DVD and use Disk Utility to return my Linux partitions to as they were before I installed Linux (they were hfs+ journalled extended).

 

What I found, having returned them to journalled Extended, was that Windows then booted normally, without need of repair. So, I am back to dual boot with Snow and Windows 7 and, as yet, no Ubuntu. Interestingly OpenSUSE 11.3 M6 leaves me in the same mess as Ubuntu. Also, I am finding inconsistencies between recent-to-recentish versions of gparted.

[srs5694]

I just made an interesting discovery. Installing Ubuntu fritzed the Windows boot, so I assumed though I had chosen to install Grub to root that Ubuntu was also, unasked, overwriting the... hybrid mbr that we are speaking of. You boot up from the Windows 7 DVD and it won't play ball, won't even get you to the repair screen (though interestingly if you use the Vista DVD, it does, but gets you no further). What I wondered was, what if I then boot from the retail snow DVD and use Disk Utility to return my Linux partitions to as they were before I installed Linux (they were hfs+ journalled extended).

 

What I found, having returned them to journalled Extended, was that Windows then booted normally, without need of repair. So, I am back to dual boot with Snow and Windows 7 and, as yet, no Ubuntu. Interestingly OpenSUSE 11.3 M6 leaves me in the same mess as Ubuntu. Also, I am finding inconsistencies between recent-to-recentish versions of gparted.

 

First, to your last point: All the Linux partitioning tools (the fdisk family, the libparted family, and the GPT fdisk family) have been changing a lot recently to deal with the shift from cylinder alignment to 1MB alignment. Microsoft went with 1MB alignment with Vista, but the Linux tools were slow to follow, and they're now changing rapidly, spurred on by the introduction of new disks that use 4096-byte physical sectors but 512-byte logical sectors. Of course, there are other changes in all of these tools, too.

 

It's odd that Windows' success at booting was dependent on non-Windows partitions. If the drive in question was a pure GPT drive (not a hybrid MBR disk), which would presumably mean it was the second or subsequent disk, then there is a possible explanation: Windows and Linux use the same GPT type code to identify their data partitions. Normally this seems to cause no problems, but it's conceivable that Windows was looking inside the Linux partitions and getting confused by something it saw there. When you changed the partitions back to HFS+, the type code would have changed, too, and Windows would then stop even looking inside the partitions. If this hypothesis is correct, you should be able to fix it in a less radical way by changing the type code alone, using GPT fdisk or some other tool that enables changing the type code without adjusting the filesystem. (Linux doesn't pay much attention to type codes, so Linux shouldn't be bothered by this change. Try setting the type code to one for, say, FreeBSD.)

 

Something similar might be happening even on MBR or hybrid disks, if the MBR type code was set incorrectly on the Linux partition.

[jamir010]

Hey guys,

I wan't to triple boot Snow Leopard, Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10!

So i started to install each Os in an own Partition.

I also want to use the new Chameleon Rc4 bootloader to manage my os's.

To dualboot Snow Leopard and Windows 7 is not a problem for me. It works great!

 

But i have the problems with Ubuntu.

I install Ubuntu at least, because of the Grub bootloader. I also installed the boatloader on the Ubuntu Partition.

The problem is, that, Ubuntu messed up the Startup from Windows 7. So i can boot into Snow Leopard and Ubuntu 9.10 but not into Windows 7.

Next I started the Windows 7 DVD to repair the startup, but the DVD tells me that Windows 7 can't be fixed.

 

I think the Porblem is because i using the GPT/MBR formatted hardrive and when i install Ubuntu it turn the harddrive into purely GPT and there for mess up the windows boot file and wont even let me attempt to repair it.

 

Is there any way to fix the problem and boot into all OS's with Chameleon RC4???

 

You need to use GPTSYNC in Ubuntu to create the hybridized GPT/MBR for the HDD. Once you run that post back your results. there are lots of guides here and on other sites that you can reference, but after struggling with over 8 failed installs of a tripleboot in a HTPC (very hi-end), I found this one solved the whole thing - start to finish - Big FloppyDonkeyDisk - triple boot solution

 

Looking forward to your feedback.

J.