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Hello Superuser community,

I'm facing a problem I can't find any solution to, after sooo much reading on the web.

Here's the situation

I have a laptop with 2 drives (sorry I could not add the screenshots ...):

  • 1 HDD of 500gb

  • 1 SSD of 16gb

When I bought it, naturally, windows was already installed, with a cache speeder whatever on the SSD drive.

So I formated the SSD and installed Xubuntu 12.04 and it went well.

After that, I never managed to boot on the very same disk.

I read everywhere that the SSD drive is not compatible with BIOS, hence I could never hope to boot onto it.

I now can see two options:

  1. Reach grub installation from Windows bootloader. I tried to do that with EasyBCD, which seemed fine and fitting my expectation, but every entry I created left me either with a black screen or with an empty GRUB starting (it seems like it's EasyBCD's Grub as far as I read)

    ==> Questions :

    • How can I make this bootloader work? Can I be sure that SSD drive is known from OS at this point of loading ?

    • How does pointer to BCD works?

    • Is there no "disk ID" I need to get and write in the Disk Entry ?

    • I have the feeling EasyBCD executes windows files to decide what to boot. Ain't it too late at this point of booting ?

    I have really tried everything in terms of EasyBCD entry configurations ... and can't find any info to customize it...

  2. Install Grub onto HDD drive and use it as bootloader as Rohit nicely recommended me

    ==> Questions :

    • Am I screwed if I format Windows SYSTEM partition ? I wanted to make another one, but got the message : Can't have more than 4 primary partitions ...
    • Where can I put GRUB ?

I'd rather choose the first solution, less risky and more logical to my eyes, but I can't find any info about how EasyBCD works besides it's not working predefined configurations ...

In general : why is it so hard to find information about how booting a computer works on the web (when so many technical informations are always available) ?

I hope I am clear, a great thanks in advance to the community !

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1 Answer 1

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  1. Least risky option is to trust GRUB and install it correctly. If your HDD is bootable (as set in BIOS), then during Xubuntu installation, install GRUB to /dev/sda (assuming that is your HDD).

  2. You should create an extended partition, which allows you to create many logical partitions inside itself http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Partition/

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