My power supply came in the mail this week for my Toshiba A200 notebook so I decided to add Windows 7 to the installed OS list (currently booting Leopard 10.5.2 and Ubuntu 9.04). As always Windows hijacked the master boot record with it’s inferior boot manager – I had to fix this immediately.
GRUB is not as complicated as people make it out to be. In fact it is a very elegant solution to handling multi-boot platforms. Here’s a quick guide to steal your MBR space back from Windows :
- Boot into live CD such as Ubuntu or Knoppix – DSL works well and is fast.
- Open a terminal, if your live CD boots into a GUI – press ALT+CTRL+F2 to access a different console.
- type “cfdisk”
This part is tricky – you must find where GRUB currently lives – in the case of the image below (my rig) sda5 is where Ubuntu is installed – in GRUB this is equal to hd0,4 – since GRUB counts from 0, not 1.
Once you have determined what partition holds grub root files – close cfdisk (q) and type :
grub
root (hd0,X) <– where X is the grub count from 0 to your current Linux installation*
setup (hd0,0)
This will opverwrite Windows MBR installation and give access back to GRUB hooray! Next step would be adding Windows boot back to grub which has already been covered in my “How To Dual Boot Hackintosh + Ubuntu” article.
* I have a difficult time expressing this simple idea – if Linux is installed on SD5 then grub should say (hd0,4). If your boot partition is /dev/sda87, GRUB would be (hd0,86) – I hope this helps.
EDIT : I forgot to mention a huge congratulations to Microsoft for making an operating system that looks and feels like Vista with the intermittent stability of XP – huge upgrade IMO.. still far from Leopard.
Out of the six (6) running PC’s within my household, 5 run either Cent OS or Ubuntu, and of course the sixth (my Powerbook) runs a purchased copy of Leopard. I decided after a few beers that it would be nice to geek it up and relax – play some games on my laptop. So I dig through my “100% SHIT” pile to locate my pirated Windows XP (with a bunch of stupid pre/post-fixes like : sp3 cracked, no wga, super awesome version — CORPORATE!) and begin a dual boot installation (with Ubuntu) on my Toshiba A200 Laptop. Unfortunately the cards weren’t in my favor as Toshiba decided that the piece of shit speakers on my notebook required high definition audio… from M$.
It makes a lot of sense to me, adding high def audio support on 3/4″ *tin sounding* speakers, so I searched for the drivers everywhere – no support. Then I remembered that the last time I got the audio working was from Windows Update. Now this Super Awesome CORPORATE mother-of-all-xp-installation discs just happened to check on line for the audio driver and to my surprise I get a WGA validation fault, and even better – it can’t find the god damn driver.
I got pissed – I don’t need a hassle to be hassled with bad software, I just want to play Diablo II & Final Fantasy 9 in peace. So I picked up the phone and with my handy dandy Asterisk server recorded a call (*1) with Windows Genuine Advantage to see what the problem was.
Listen to Windows Genuine Advantage Call
I have realized that every single time I use Windows I run into some kind of hassle.. So I have officially made the decision to boycott all Windows products and as many non-mandatory protocols as possible to eliminate the additional stress from my life.
I am not trying to start an OS flame war here, I just can not stand this garbage and thought the world should know….. again.
