[gentoo-user] Re: Dual booting Dell with Windows 7

[walt <w41ter@gmail.com>]

Mick wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> 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?
> 
> Anyway, I do not want to interfere with the Dell/MS Windows OS way of booting, 
> at least until the warranty expires.  What is the recommended way of dual 
> booting with Gentoo?  In the past I have either installed GRUB in the MBR and 
> chainloaded WinXP from there, or I have installed GRUB in the Linux partition 
> boot record and then used NTLDR to chainload grub from the MSWindows 
> bootloader.

Not the answer you asked for, but I'm running the public beta of Win7 on
virtualbox, and it works so well that leaving the original install on the
machine seems like a waste of space to me.  Maybe the fancy-shmancy desktop
with the transparent windows won't work quite as well on virtualbox, but I
don't use Windows anyway, unless I'm forced.