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Dual Boot Question

Professor`

Sun Oct 30, 2011 5:04:56 pm

Newbie here to Zorin OS5 but i really love it so far, I Just installed it on my windows 7 machine. Problem is, I can boot to Zorin but i cannot boot to windows, The option is there to boot to windows but it just shows a blinking cursor when i select it, My system consist of 2 150GB hdds in Raid 0 and a 1TB hdd as stand alone , Zorin installed on the 1TB drive And i am writing this question via zorin os now , How can i get it to boot windows 7 ? IS there a issue with the raid that is causing it to not boot ? If so is there a fix ? My system is a MSI MB with a Athlon XP 6000+ Cpu, 8Gb Ram, 2 150GB hdds in Raid 0 and a 1TB hdd . Geforce 9600GT.

Professor`

Sun Oct 30, 2011 10:30:25 pm

swarfendor437 wrote:Try the fix from here: http://zoringroup.com/blog/2011/06/17/z ... t-bug-fix/

This fix does not solve anything as i did try it before posting this question, Everything is there, i can boot Zorin fine, but when i click Windows 7 i just get a blinking cursor. Zorin is installed on a single hdd, windows 7 is installed on a Raid 0 array, The only way i can get back in windows <where i am at now> is using Hirens Boot CD and using the windows loader. i cannot get into windows with the grub loader.

jymm

Thu May 24, 2012 11:34:42 am

I have personally given up on dual boots. I find virtual drives a better option. I always end up not being able to boot into one OS or the other eventually with a dual boot. Usually the system I want the most. I have tried dual boots with both windows/Linux and Linux/Linux OS and always had one dual boot OS eventually not being able to boot into. First problem was with XP and Xandros using LILO and the second time with Mint and Lubuntu using grub. That is when I found Zorin. Try Oracle VM VirtualBox, it can be downloaded for Windows from Softpedia for free,and Zorin's software center can install it on Zorin.

DanYHKim

Thu May 24, 2012 9:59:51 pm

I have observed, in other dual boot situations, that Windows really, really likes to be in the first logical partition. If it is not installed in the first partition, then it will have a fit and give up. While GRUB can sometimes be made to trick Windows into thinking it is number one, it was a pain to get it to work, and that was before GRUB2, which I can't figure out very well.

There is some kind of utility that can be used to repair the boot instructions that Windows uses, letting it boot from somewhere other than the first partition, but I wasn't able to make it work when I tried it. I gave up and just installed Windows first, leaving enough unallocated space on the hard drive to add an ext4 and swap partition for Zorin OS to live in afterwards.

When Zorin OS was installed to a computer that already has Windows 7 installed, with unallocated space for Zorin's installer to create its own partitions, the dual boot worked fine. I was even able to edit /etc/default/grub to make Windows my default boot OS (This was a concession to my daughter, who wanted to use Windows and not Zorin at home).