On 15 February 2010 23:45, Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:
On Saturday 13 February 2010 17:13:51 Willie Wong wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 03:09:35PM +0000, Mick wrote:
> > I bought a Dell XPS laptop which seems to have 3 primary partitions.  The
> > third partition is where Windows 7 resides, while the second partition is
> > flagged as bootable.  The first partition contains some Dell (recovery)
> > tools. I am lead to believe that the second partition is the back up
> > partition and is meant to be used to restore the OS in the third
> > partition.  This confuses me a bit - shouldn't the third partition which
> > houses the OS be flagged as bootable instead?
>
> Take a look at this
> http://lifehacker.com/5403100/dual+boot-windows-7-and-ubuntu-in-perfect-har
> mony Apparently you can now re-size online partitions with Windows 7
>  itself.
>
> Google also suggests you can chainload Windows 7 in the usual way using
> grub.

Thank you both for your replies.  If I were to choose GRUB to chainload W7
what should I point it to?  Dell's partition 2 which has the boot flag, or the
main W7 OS partition 3?

If I were to use W7's NTLDR equivalent - whatever this technology might be -
will I be able to chainload GRUB from it?
--
Regards,
Mick

Take a look at EasyBCD: http://neosmart.net/forums/showthread.php?t=642
The latest betas of version 2 allow you to use the Vista/Win7 bootloader to chainload grub and so boot linux. Its pretty easy to setup aswell as all you do is tell it to add an entry to your bootloader and then direct it to your /boot partition that has grub installed.
Of course its not as pretty as some of the things you can do in grub/grub2, but it does work.

The only downside is that you need to register on their forums in order to download the latest betas :(

- Nick


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Pablo Picasso  - "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."