Triple booting / bypassing the windows boot manager

[Tymon]

This is pretty advanced stuff I think, hope I can figure it out.

So, I'm triple booting right now, or at least, I'd want to be. Up until today I dual-booted windows XP-64 and Ubuntu 64-bit, each in seperate partitions. Worked fine, just choose the os at start up.

I shrunk my ubuntu partition this afternoon, and installed Windows 7-64 on the unallocated space. Installed fine, os works fine.

My problem now arises in that when I start the pc, I get the windows boot loader, instead of the bios' OS loader. Windows boot loader only allows you to choose the main windows os (win7) or a previous install (winxp).

This makes ubuntu completely unbootable, to my knowledge.

Anyone know how I can get rid of the boot loader so I, hopefully, can choose between all 3 of my OSes?

[Kryssan]

It's generally an unwritten rule not to install Windows over Linux if you're intending to multiboot your system, because Windows will always overwrite the boot loaders. Always better to go Windows > Linux with multiple OS partitions/boots.


However, getting it back isn't necessarily difficult if you already had it setup to begin with. Just use a LiveCD to edit your bootloader and make it the primary again. You may find Windows doesn't appear in the bootloader however (I'm guessing you're not using Grub/Lilo so how you go about doing this will be up to you to determine), and if so you'll have to make some manual entries to your load program to get it in there, as installing Windows after Linux means Linux doesn't know Windows is supposed to exist either.

[Obiron]

I haven't tried a triple boot yet, but this site is a good guide for dual boot scenarios (can use the drop down list for instructions based on which OS combos and which was installed first). The Vista scenarios work just fine for Windows 7 installs. This should help you get the bootloader configured properly, and you can use either the Windows bootloader or GRUB. I don't see any reason this wouldn't work for a triple boot setup.

[virusiidx]

Check your bios to make sure you are booting into where GRUB is installed first, should be the Ubuntu drive. There should be a priority of which HDD will load first.

If both Ubuntu and Windows are on the same drive and it's still booting directly into the windows bootloader, then you need to re-install GRUB by loading up the LiveCD again.

If GRUB loads, but Windows is not listed, then check your /boot/grub/menu.lst file to make sure the hdd/partitions are listed correctly.

Should look something like this at the end of the file:

## ## End Default Options ##

title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-13-generic
uuid 0150c80d-2cf5-41ab-a22e-c591dbe9278a
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-13-generic root=UUID=0150c80d-2cf5-41ab-a22e-c591dbe9278a ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-13-generic
quiet

title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-13-generic (recovery mode)
uuid 0150c80d-2cf5-41ab-a22e-c591dbe9278a
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-13-generic root=UUID=0150c80d-2cf5-41ab-a22e-c591dbe9278a ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-13-generic



title Ubuntu 9.04, memtest86+
uuid 0150c80d-2cf5-41ab-a22e-c591dbe9278a
kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin
quiet

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

# This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian
# ones.
title Other operating systems:
root

title Windows 7 x64
root (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Windows 7 is my 2nd HDD as you can see above. Make sure root is set to the right HDD (hd#,#) where the #'s are the hard drive the OS is located on, and the partition on that drive. The order depends on the priority of the drives from the bios.

So if windows is on your 2nd drive and first partition (or only partition), then it should be (hd1,0) just like mine above. If it's on the 3rd drive, first partition, then (hd2,0) and so on...

Hope that helps. But I'm pretty sure it's just the windows drive that is booting up first, thus skipping the GRUB bootloader.

[virusiidx]

Also forgot to mention if you are using XP as one of the boot OS's in GRUB then it might have a problem loading. Let me know if it is though because that's a different story.