Take the 2-minute tour ×

you may have become tired of the question i'm about to ask, since i've already found some posts concerning my issue. however, none of those seemed to work for me.

so here's the thing:

my goal is to have dual-boot on my laptop( HP elitebook 8540w), with the win-bootloader in the mbr. i already had win7 ultimate installed, along with the win-bootloader in the mbr. so now i've installed ubuntu 11.10 on it's own partition (now I have the system-partition sda1, the win-partition sda2 and the ubuntu-partition sda5 - don't ask me why the enumeration turned out to be so weird.) after not being able to install grub to a location other than the mbr (it always ended with an error message and 'exit code 1' or something like that), i figured i could simply install it to the mbr, then remove it with the win-repair-tools, and then add an ubuntu-entry with easy-bcd to the win-bootloader. however, the last part doesn't work (even if i specify that easy-bcd can use its own copy of grub). So now i ended up with having ubuntu installed, without being able to boot into it. Hence, i'm desperately trying to somehow install grub on sda5, so that i can finally create a valid, working entry for ubuntu in the win bootloader, but kind of failed miserably so far. i already tried 'install grub' on the live cd (something like grub-install /dev/sda5), but it always returned an error message about not finding some specific files or folders (i can try it again if you need this more detailed)

so now i'd be very very grateful for some hints how i could finally make everything work as it should :)


share|improve this question
The reasoning for the partition numbers jumping to 5 is due to tradition mostly. sda1 to sda4 are used for primary MBR partitions, whereas 5+ are used for extended MBR logical partitions. Often you'll see {sda1, sda2. sda3. sda5} because 5 actually is a logical partition sitting inside the fourth primary partition (an unusable sda4) –  Huckle Mar 17 '12 at 2:49
Use wubi then... –  Uri Herrera Apr 17 '12 at 1:36
add comment

1 Answer

Here's the thing about the Windows bootloader. It was designed to do one thing and one thing only, boot windows. Therefore it will by default expect an NTFS filesystem with one of a handful of Windows boot files on it (NTLDR, bootmgr, winload.exe, etc). Obviously Ubuntu will not have any of these files, furthur it will be on a filesystem bootmgr can't even read.

Sadly, what you're asking for is unrealistic, if not impossible.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Your Answer


