I can't make my Windows 8 boot loader to run Ubuntu or even ask me which OS to run as dual boot!

Question

I've been trying to install Ubuntu 12.04 as secondary OS on my laptop. The primary OS I have is Windows 8.

So I have partitioned drive where NTFS is for Windows 8 and other partition is EXT4 for Ubuntu.

When I installed Ubuntu I picked the EXT4 partition and picked 3 boot loader options so far:

/dev/sta ATA HITACHI (750 GB) <-= this...
/dev/sta1 Windows 8 (loader) <-= and this...
/dev/sta2
/dev/sta5
/dev/sta6 Ubuntu 12.04 (12.04) <-= and this...
/dev/stb

After like 3 installations I still can't boot Ubuntu, nor can even see any boot loader... It goes straight to Windows 8 booting...

Please help! This has been very frustrating day and a half... And I don't think it should take that long to figure out =[

Answer 1

How about you use /dev/sta6 for the grub bootloader. Next steps:

• Run update-grub to write the ubuntu bootsector
• Copy the ubuntu bootsector into a file: dd if=/dev/sta6 of=boot.lnx bs=512 count=1
• Transfer the file to the windows loader partition /dev/sta1, either by copying or via usb stick and booting to windows.

Then use these commands in windows shell to add a Linux selection to the windows loader:

bcdedit /create /d “Linux” /application BOOTSECTOR

BCDEdit will return an alphanumeric identifier for this entry that I will refer to as {ID} in the remaining steps. You’ll need to replace {ID} by the actual returned identifier. An example of {ID} is {d7294d4e-9837-11de-99ac-f3f3a79e3e93}. Next, let’s specify which partition hosts a copy of the boot.lnx file:

bcdedit /set {ID} device partition=c:

bcdedit /set {ID} path \boot.lnx

bcdedit /displayorder {ID} /addlast

bcdedit /timeout 30

http://www.iceflatline.com/2009/09/how-to-dual-boot-windows-7-and-linux-using-bcdedit/