0

This seems like it should be simple, but I've spent two hours following all the advice I could find to no avail. I have windows 7 installed on one internal harddrive (sdb) and I have just installed linux mint 17.2 on another harddrive (sda). Linux mint did not detect windows 7 when installing, so I just manually installed it on sda and am now trying to add a grub entry for win7.

When I run os-prober I get nothing back. When I run update-grub, it seems to change nothing.

Currently in grub-customizer I have the code for the win7 entry set to: http://pastebin.com/vyvW9TMk

My fdisk -l is: http://pastebin.com/e1MWGyDm

My parted -l is: http://pastebin.com/q7j4pZcP

My blkid is: http://pastebin.com/BrSxZ4y9

I have tried many many permutations of settings, along with different partition ids such as (hd1,0) (hd1,1) (hd1,2) (hd1,msdos0) (hd1,msdos1) ...

When I try to select the menu option when booting up, each either says the EFI path is invalid, or says it can't find disk. When I manually select my windows harddrive (/dev/sdb) from the BIOS... then it loads windows just fine.

Thank you in advance for any help you can give!

Thomas
  • 101
  • 3
  • So the 2TB sdb (currently, the a/b/c letters tend to change with reboots) has windows 7 on it? If you pick it from the BIOS/EFI boot from menu, does it run ok? os-prober should have found it, if it were working ok. Or was there any disabling EFI or other trouble when installing linux? – Xen2050 Dec 11 '15 at 10:33

1 Answers1

1

Try the Boot-Repair utility. Instructions are on the Ubuntu site, but Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, and virtually anything that works in Ubuntu will work in Linux Mint (except probably Unity stuff, unless you voluntarily installed Unity in Mint... *shudder* ;-)

Instructions that should work in any Mint (tested in Linux Mint 17.2 & older) are:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair

Then just run boot-repair , it's probably in a programs menu too.

It can do a lot of stuff automatically, pretty much a one-click fix, and is supposed to be able to find & add other OS's, and can find more info for diagnostics too.

Does Windows 7 still boot & run ok, when picked from the BIOS/EFI pick a drive to boot menu?

If it's EFI problems causing Windows to just not work, this question could help (but may be detrimental to Linux): How can I repair the Windows 8 EFI Bootloader?

Xen2050
  • 13,643
  • 4
  • 24
  • 42
  • Thank you. Yes, Win7 works just fine when I manually switch to booting from my 2TB drive via the BIOS. When I ran boot-repair I get this message: "GPT detected. Please create a BIOS-Boot partition (>1MB, unformatted filesystem, bios_grub flag). This can be performed via tools such as Gparted. Then try again. Alternatively, you can retry after activating the [Separate /boot/efi partition:] option." I am not sure what it wants me to do. I switch OSs rarely and so using the BIOS is okay. Still it's not ideal and odd since I have probably installed linuxes 15x before and it's always "just worked". – Thomas Dec 15 '15 at 08:37
  • Btw, it looks like boot-repair runs "os-prober" behind the scenes and so it may be just as susceptible to whatever problem it's having. Maybe this is all because I installed windows before adding a second smaller SSD for linux. That is the only difference I can remember from the many times this has worked in the past. – Thomas Dec 15 '15 at 08:39