I decided to convert a laptop that I have to Dual boot both Fedora 15 and Windows 7 Pro.
I've added a second hard drive (500Gb) to this machine in the second hard disk bay. This laptop does not allow you to select the booting internal hard disk so I will need to use a boot manager to bring up Linux or Windows 7.
Fedora 14 X86_64 loaded with zero problems, except for the new Gnome 3 desktop, which is a puzzle to use. I kind of see the direction they are attempting to go, but it is still not comfortable to use. Fedora was loaded on the 1st hard disk.
Windows 7 was is a pain in ass in a dual boot configuration. It wants to be the "booting drive". I defeated this by removing the 1st drive with Fedora 15 on it, and rebooted to install Windows 7 on the 2nd drive, which is now seen as drive 0 by Bios. I finished the install, checked that it was a working clean install and proceeded to reinstall the Fedora 15 Drive.
To boot Windows 7 I had to add a "Grub" loader entry in the menu.lst file in /boot/grub/. This is the menu entry that worked...
title Windows 7 Pro
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot
It looks crazy and it sort of is. The two Map commands reverse the drive order,
and the rootnoverify tells grup that the second drive is usable for boot, makeactive fakes setting the drive as primary and active on the boot partition, chainloader +1 reads in the windows 7 boot loader from the 2nd drive, and boot starts the load.
It works.
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