Is it possible to dual boot windows 7 and ubuntu, with ubuntu on a external hard drive? I can connect my external hard drive via USB 2.0, USB 3.0 or E-SATA. I want windows 7 as my main OS.
View 8 RepliesI installed Ubuntu on a older Toshiba laptop. When I boot up it asks me to select either Windows 7 or Ubuntu. I want to get rid of the Ubuntu disk partition and give that 2.9 GB space to my primary hard drive. I go into compmgmt.msc but I can't execute any commands on that disk partition.
View 3 Replies View RelatedI have a Dell Inspiron 1440 laptop with Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit. Some of my older applications do not support this platform. My processor does not support Window Virtual PC and Windows XP mode so I was hoping to add XP as a dual boot. Is it possible to boot XP from an external harddrive or USB instead of having to partition the internal hard drive. Or do you have any suggestions on how I can load XP after Windows 7 is already loaded.
View 2 Replies View Relatedcan I dual boot using an ext. Hard drive. I found an old 250gb phanton hd I've never used. Figured I could throw it in there. Would vista dual boot to that. Or no??
View 2 Replies View RelatedI have a Toshiba laptop that came with a preinstalled copy of Windows-7 (64 bit) version purchased in July 2010. No setup disk came with the laptop, but there is a "Toshiba recovery media creator" utility. Now, I want to format my laptop, and here I have few queries regarding this:
[1] What is the better option for formatting my drive? Should I use the Toshiba media-creator or install a clean version of Windows-7 from an ISO download (am I allowed to do that? If so, what is a good site to download?) There is a "sticker-certificate" on the bottom of my laptop with a product-key. Will it work with the new install?
[2] Do I have the option of installing a 32-bit version of Windows-7 instead of 64-bit with the above license? The reason is that most applications I use are 32-bit and hence a 32-bit OS is better suited for me. But does the license allow me to do that?
[3] (The tricky part) - Since I have a good 320GB HDD, I want to dual-boot by creating two partitions - with a linux distribution (Ubuntu/openSuse) running on the second partition? Assuming I don't have the option of clean-install, will I be able to create the extra partition for linux using the Toshiba utility?
I lost access to my windows 7 drive (Dual-boot windows 7 & Ubuntu). every time I try to run Windows 7 I get the message: Bootmgr is compressed, Press CTRL_ALT-DEL to restart. I could run Bootrec /fixmbr or diskpart or attrib to rebuild my mbr table through DOS command window using my windows 7 recovery CD. The problem I cannot access drive C: where my windows 7 are. I get the error message: Cannot open volume for direct access or system cannot find the drive path or specified. I still can access all my windows folders and files through home folder in Ubuntu. I don't want to reformat and reinstall windows. Is there is a way to run the DOS commands within Ubuntu
View 3 Replies View RelatedI've just got a new HP laptop with windows 7 Home Premium.
Anytime Upgraded to Ultimate.
i want to boot to windows XP (SP2) on this new laptop..(Not necessarily Dual-Boot). there is only on program i need to use under XP.
the dual-booting tutorials here are quite in depth and potentially problematic for none techie like me. i would prefer not re-partion the drive and 'hide' one operating system from the other, so what i would prefer to do is this...
1. Plug in an External hard drive (USB 2.0).Clean and factory formatted.
2. Go into my BIOS > Disable boot from internal hard drive > enable boot from CD Drive (first)
3. Exit BIOS having saved changes
4. insert win XP Install disk in drive.
So, in theory XP Install should be like on a brand new machine.
when i want to use windows 7 i would reverse the BIOS changes and make sure external drive with XP is not connected.
So, windows 7 would not know XP is even in use.
Is all this viable... or is there something that would prevent it from working?
I just restarted my PC and i kept getting erros regarding hardware, at first it would just hold at updating dmi pool , after i reset the bios to fail safe defaults it would then give me the I/O error. I noticed my external drive was turned off and I turned it on and windows booted fine. Is there a connection here i can disable?
Windows is installed on my SSD drive not my external.
What happened to my computer is, I kept getting the BSOD, I went into safe mode, removed the most recent programs I had installed, and it stopped happening. I then proceeded to plug in my external hard drive. It was not recognizing it for some reason, so I went to disk management. It was listed there, just without a drive letter. I tried to assign it a drive letter, and it gave me an error message saying something about refreshing the list, (this is the error message I should have researched), I tried refreshing the drive list, and tried reassigning the drive letter, same message. I right clicked on the drive again, and I saw mark as active. For some stupid reason, I clicked on this. Then seeing that it didn't do anything, I thought maybe restarting the computer would maybe do the trick. Now my computer won't boot.
It gets to the windows logo, and boom, restarts all over again. I tried many things like, startup repair, system restore, marking partition as active CMD, with diskpart, I also tried some of the commands in bootrec.exe. By the way, if this helps at all, my hard drive is a solid state drive, I also have a slave drive in there which does also have a copy of windows installed on it, (it was my old hard drive), I tried setting that as my primary boot and it boots into my old install of windows, before i got my solid state drive. Is there a way I can fix the startup by having access to it from an operating system instead of the recovery environment?
How can i dual boot windows 7 and Linux. Can i just create a disk partition and install Linux on that and have windows on another partition and will i be able to choose which one i want on boot? or do i have to do something else i have windows installed now.
View 2 Replies View RelatedOk so what i have is Windows 7 RC installed to my hard drive. I have a seperate partition which i would like to install Ubuntu on. Granted i could just go ahead and straight install but then i would be using the Grub bootloader and i don't want to.
What is my best option? That NeoGrub thing?
I have a Windows 7 OS installed on a SATA drive, A few days ago I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on an IDE drive. So far the only way is to switch the HDD drives in BIOS to boot up the one I want.
View 4 Replies View RelatedI currently run Ubuntu as the sole OS on my Laptop. Using a G-Parted live CD I partitioned half of my disk space, the one half dedicated to running Ubuntu and the other half to Windows 7. I downloaded a torrent of Windows 7, one that I have used before with success (so one that I trust) and burned it to a DVD-RW at the slowest burning speed possible. I booted Windows 7 through the DVD and began to do a clean install of Windows 7 on this one Partition that I left completely empty for the new OS. Everything runs smoothly and I go through the set-up until suddenly the installation hangs at 0% when 'Expanding Windows Files'.
View 1 Replies View RelatedI want to load Ubuntu in my Lenevo laptop having core i3 processor which has window7 os. detail procedure of installing Ubuntu over Window7.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI can't get Win 7 to boot after setting up dual boot (Ubuntu 10.10) on my GF's laptop. I'll describe the problem and everything that has been tried so far. REALLY hoping somebody has an idea, I'm getting desperate.I installed Ubuntu last night via the Live CD. Used the Live version to install alongside Windows and partition the drive, install Grub, etc. At reboot, after POST it would just go to a black screen with a flashing cursor. I could only run off the live CD. A forum member determined the Grub was trying to load from the wrong partition. We changed that and voila! Grub now loads properly. I can boot into Ubunto via Grub with zero problems. HOWEVER: when I try to boot into Win 7 from Grub, it just locks at the same flashing cursor of death screen. The 7 partition is till intact, I can see and access all the files on the 7 partition from within Ubuntu, however 7 will not boot. I have tried downloading and burning the Win 7 repair disk and doing all of the following,Running the automatic Start Up Repair - several times. All it does is remove Grub, but booting still goes to the flashing cursor and I have to reinstall Grub again to be able to do anything after POST.I have used the command prompt to run "bootsect /nt60 SYS /mbr". Has the same effect as above.I have used all the bootsec.exe /fixmbr, /fixboot, and /rebuildBCD commands. Again, all have the same effect and I have to reinstall Grub to get anywhere.I don't have an installation disk to try and just do a repair install because Asus apparently doesn't feel that I would need one of these. All I have is the recovery disks from the Asus AIRecovery application that want to just re-format the entire drive and start over. This isn't an option. It's my GF's laptop (mine gave up the ghost last week) and we both have WAY too much highly important data on here. Not to mention she would castrate me . Now from all my research the only other thing I've come across that sounds possible is that the boot flag needs to be set to a different partition. Somebody had a somewhat similar problem and it turned out the way Dell set up the system the boot flag had to be moved to a recovery partition and it worked fine. I'm wondering if Asus has something similar going on, but I can't figure out how to move the boot flag. I'm going on 12 straight hours of working on this now
View 9 Replies View RelatedAbout 6 months ago I set up a new machine dual boot using GParted with the following configuration:
/dev/sda1 ntfs (Windows 7 system reserved) 100 MB
/dev/sda2 ntfs (Windows7 C: drive) 99 GB (includes 4 GB of preloaded page file space)
/dev/sda3 ntfs (Shared drive - Windows7 E: Drive / Ubuntu sda3) 801 GB
/dev/sda4 extended partition 32 GB
/dev/sda5 ext4 (Linux Root) 30 GB
/dev/sda6 linux-swap 2 GB
I set it up so that I could access my E: drive from either the windows or ubuntu operating system. It has worked perfectly so far (about 6 months). But, here is the problem:For some reason as the share drive (my E: drive / sda3) grows Windows thinks that the windows system drive (sda2/c:drive) is also growing. So that now I have a low storage warning stating that there is only 8.76 GB of free space left on my 99 GB C: drive. When, in reality, there should be about 77 GB of free space. I've made hidden files/folders viewable and downloaded treesizefree so I know what should be on the drive. The Treesizefree output shows the expected 22 GB of space but also shows only 9 GB of free space. So, the missing space is nearly exactly the size of my shared drive (sda3/E:drive). So somehow, I think the windows OS is double counting my shared E: drive against my C: drive.
I have a Dell Inspiron 1545 (2.5 years old). All my data is backed up so I have no concerns about recoverying data.First, the laptop crashed and ran several chkdsk on start up. I froze several times during this. It said it had fixed some errors then started up again.This time it wanted to do start up repair. Same thing kept happening, froze at least twenty times during this. Eventually it gave me the blue screen of death.
'Technical information
*** STOP: 0x000000F4 (0x0000000000000003, 0xFFFFFA8004C1D260, 0xFFFFFA8004C1D498, 0xFFFFF8000130DDA0)'
This repeated several times. I ran the diagnostics and it told me the hard drive could not be found (error code 0146, 2000-0146). Essentially, it's a Dell laptop (I know) and I am not bothered about recovering the hard drive.I would, however, like to install Windows 7, or alternatively Linux, onto my external hard drive. But I just can't seem to get it to work.I have extracted a Linux iso to the external hard drive I want to install on, onto a cd, onto a FAT32 8gb usb stick, but it has given me the bootmgr is missing error every time. I have tried it with the interal HDD in and removed.I am no longer concerned about the internal HDD, i can use it for a door stop for all I am concerned, I just want to load ANY os onto my external hard drive so I can get the laptop working.
I just installed Ubuntu to make my computer dual boot with Windows 7. When the option in Ubuntu came up to install it along Windows 7, I selected it. Well, after the install my monitor pops up a box saying "Out of Range" and nothing comes up, then Ubuntu boots. I never get the option to boot Win7. If I hit a button while the monitor is out of range, nothing boots.
View 3 Replies View RelatedI had windows installed on a disk (sda) and decided to install ubuntu 10.10 in another disk (sdb). Ubuntu installed Grub2 boot loader in sdb and both systems seem to work fine. Except windows hibernation (which worked normally before the Ubuntu installation). What happens is this:
1. If I set the BIOS to startup from disk sdb, GRUB comes out. When I select windows and try to hibernate, the screen goes black and after a couple of seconds the log in screen appears. So, I can not hibernate windows when I use GRUB. By the way, ubuntu hibernates normally.
2. If I set the BIOS to startup from disk sda, windows load (without GRUB of course) and hibernate actually works. But when I turn on the pc windows resuming is the only option. I can not activate the bbs popup and even if I set bios to boot from the other disk (sdb) the system seems to ignore me and resumes windows without displaying GRUB loader.So, I can either hibernate windows but have to resume before I can use ubuntu or start windows using grub and not have the option to hibernate. From the above I get that windows 7 have a way of controlling the system's BIOS and prevent loading another os when windows are hibernated. I say windows 7 because my laptop has a similar dual boot (vista with ubuntu 9.04) and hibernation works for both systems and I can load whichever I want after that. I tried to find information about Windows 7 hibernation and bios but I couldn't find anything clear enough.
I have also tried EasyBCD but it didn't change a thing. I have already seen the posts about active partitions, boot partitions, boot flag (in ubuntu), turned off hybrid sleep, prevented all devices from waking up windows but nothing works. I started a thread ([ubuntu] Hibernate Problem in Windows 7 but not in Ubuntu 10.10 - Ubuntu Forums) since I though it was a GRUB2 problem but no one seemed to know what to do (or no one cared)... So, I' m left with the above assumption (windows 7 controlling bios).
I currently have a system running XP with two IDE hard drives and 3 partitions.
I have taken Windows 7 as a chance to get myself some much needed extra space! and purchased a new 1tb SATA drive.
I really dont want to lose the exisitng data I have so my original plan was to take my main IDE harddrive with most of my data stick it in an external USB carrier and then start fresh in the system with the 1tb and Windows 7.
What would be cooler would be if I could add the 1tb to the exisiting system and install Windows 7 on that (ideally with that as C and either then have much quicker access to transfer data to the new drive or even dual boot with XP at first incase I have any issues with Windows 7. Can anyone advice me on how easy/risky this is? And what they would suggest to someone trying to maximise the uptime of their PC?
I have Ubuntu dual booting on Windows 7. After the bios load, is there anyway that I can make Windows 7 boot right away without selecting anything on the OS selection? The same way it would boot without dual boot...if that makes any sense.If the above exists: Let's say I use Windows 7 all the time, but one day I decide to boot into Ubuntu. Is there a way that I can press a button, before Windows 7 loads, to make the OS selection come up?I tried to make myself as clear as possible and I hope that you understand what I'm trying to say.
View 9 Replies View RelatedI want to upgrade Vista to Windows 7, but without disturbing my Ubuntu installation, which is dual boot with Vista. I would prefer to do a clean install of Windows 7 over Vista, which has had niggling little issues (I resolve them and new ones appear) ever since I bought the pc. I don't have the recovery discs for Vista (the ones you make when you buy a new system) as they went missing during a major move.
What is the best way to accomplish all the above? Also, from what I understand, a clean installation can be done with an upgrade version of Windows 7 as long as a previous version of Vista or XP is already on the machine?
I set up a dual boot of Ubuntu and Windows 7 on my lenovo u330 laptop a couple months ago and everything was working fine. That was till I found a problem with the wireless when switching from Ubuntu over to 7. I found that if I left the wireless off in Ubuntu and restart to 7, the wireless is completely disconnected in 7. Later I learned that if I enabled the wireless in Ubuntu and restart into 7, the wireless works fine. Now, the major problem is that the Ubuntu 11.04 update completely screwed the Ubuntu installation. The graphics nor the internet worked after the update so basically I'm stuck with the wireless off in Windows 7.
Also, I deleted the Ubuntu partition to possibly reinstall it but another problem is that I got the install from a friend (who isn't around). Someone told me that Ubuntu actually shuts down the wireless card at the hardware level. Any low level way of enabling the wireless adapter in Windows 7? ipconfig gives me the "Media disconnected" message on all of the adapter connections. I have already tried reinstalling wireless drivers as well and none of the Windows 7 troubleshooting apps work whatsoever.
I am thinking about dual-booting my system with Windows 7 as the main OS, and linux ubuntu as a secondary. I have a few questions:
1. How much space should I leave for ubuntu's partition?
2. How do I make a swap partition (or whatever it is called, for swapping files between OS's)?
3. Can I set it up to automatically boot into windows unless I am holding down a specific key, or something similar?
BTW, my HDD is ~500gb, but my current (factory) windows partition is 450gb.
I have a 300gb harddrive that i shrank by 50gb to make room for a windows 7 rc1 32 bit dual boot. I now need to extend the partition because i have almost filled it up. When i shrink the main partition (the 238gb one) that has vista on it, it won't let me extend the windows 7 partition onto it.
This is what it looks like in diskmgmt.msc
Vista (188gb)/Unallocated space (~50gb)/Windows (50gb)/HP_RECPVERY (9.91gb)
I have just replaced the hard drive on my laptop as the original was starting to fail. I created an image of the windows 7 pro 32bit original drive. I replaced the hard drive and installed a clean 64 bit version of windows. I have also installed a clean 32 bit version as a dual boot. I now want to use the original image of the 32 bit system and install this on the clean 32 bit installation.I have tried this using the image software I have (snapshot) but cannot get it to work.
View 2 Replies View RelatedMy Acer netbook has developed some kind of fault and I am unsure as to what I ought to do. The netbook does boot to BIOS and also will boot up from an external drive...but will not boot normally. I am thinking of replacing the hard drive but don't know if there could be something else wrong. It says sometimes that it can't read it and from this I am not sure if there is something else wrong. If I change the drive does it sound as though things will work? There are also a couple of other intermittent faults such as certain letters and numbers not working and then everything is fine for a while...
View 4 Replies View RelatedI read that if you have Windows 7 installed, it ruins Ubuntu. I want my computer to have both, so I was wondering, how can I dual boot them without them clashing? I don't want to use Wubi, by the way.
View 4 Replies View RelatedI would like to install Linux Ubuntu on my laptop alongside Windows using dual boot. However, people keep telling me that it is not a good idea this to be done on a laptop because of driver comparability and stuff like that. So is it OK if dual boot Ubuntu and Windows on a laptop or it is a terrible idea?
View 5 Replies View RelatedOk so I am running two operating systems at the moment: Windows 7 Ultimate 64x and Ubuntu Linux 9.10
I have them both in my dual boot menu, but I have a question as to how to organize them.
I recently visited this thread: Dual-Boot Windows 7 64-bit and 32-bit
...and they were basically explaining how to set your default boot OS to Windows 7. Well, I kinda have the same problem, except for when I follow the instructions on that thread, I get to the part where it tells you how to set it to default, but the only OS that shows up is Windows 7. It does not show any sign of Ubuntu whatsoever. Is it because I have to have a WINDOWS OS or what? But I would like to organize my boot menu to where it highlights Windows 7 as the first boot option rather than Ubuntu because I want Windows 7 to be the first OS on the list. Any help on how to make that happen, if possible?
I had Ubuntu installed on an external HDD, but back when I had XP, I formatted it for general storage. Now I'm running Seven and I have no idea how to remove the Ubuntu option from my Dual Boot menu.
View 9 Replies View Related