Dual boot and grub 2

[ozitraveller]

Hi

I've not tried dual boot with grub2 yet, so I'm wondering whether there are any issues? I want to dual boot with Debian Wheezy.

My live-build environment is wheezy in a vm. which is now borked. It was going so nicely too.  At least I have a backup, so no damage.

Has anyone done this? Are there any tricks to get this to work?

Cheers
Ozi

[jst_joe]

I've done it with Win 7 on a separate internal HDD with no issues.

[ozitraveller]

Thanks jst_joe, a weekend chore then.

[PackRat]

I have been dual booting for years since the wife and I need Windows for work. Currently dual booting Windows 7 and Debian Testing. I have not tried a dual boot with Windows 8.

It's no issue. If you have the set-up the best way is to have separate hard drives. Install Windows 7 first. Then when you install Debian, you will have some flexibility to where you want to install grub. I actually install grub to the second hard drive (sdb1) and leave the mbr alone. I then set up in the BIOS to boot from the second drive. This way, if Debian (or Windows) gets borked, there is no damage to the other OS.

Read through the grub install options and see what works for you.

[lwfitz]

Packrat hit it right on the head.

Dual boot with Windows 7 or 8 is no problem at all. The only thing I would suggest is to install Windows first and the Linux as Windows MBR will overwrite grub and you will then have to repair it.

[jst_joe]

Absolutely as PackRat and lwfitz stated above if dual booting with Windows install it first.
You can reinstall grub back to the mbr with most live cd's if you install Windows after because it WILL bork your boot loader.
However since your dual booting Wheezy (I'm assuming on one HDD) just install grub to the the root partition of your Wheezy install then boot as normal.
Your new install won't show up in the grub menu until you load your main install and run sudo update-grub, then reboot and your new install will be listed in the grub menu.
Hope this helps.

[ozitraveller]

Thanks All, excellent info!

My laptop dual boots, win 7 and debian non-grub2, and it's been like this for a number of years now without issue.

My desktop has debian sid with grub2 and I want to dual boot debian stable. Absolutely a non-windows pc.

I only need to vpn into work, so all of my windows development is handled this way. And the laptop handles a small bit of other windows stuff.

So it looks like little has changed in the way to setup dual boot.

Cheers
Ozi