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I have two partitions on my hard-didk , I have installed ubuntu on my 1st partition and windows 8 later on another partition.Now i can only boot into windows 8 because it doesn't recognize Ubuntu.

How would i dual boot my PC without using grub . I would like using Windows 8 boot manager as its pretty neat.

This is what i have tried :

I tried using easyBCD but it doesn't work.It causes the boot manager to switch to windows 7 Boot Manager .

EasyBCD creates a C:/NST/AutoNeoGrub0.mbr file .

As EasyBCD was causing the boot manager to switch i created a manual entry to the BCD store uisng windows bcdedit command and point it to the C:/NST/AutoNeoGrub0.mbr file created by EasyBCD. This gave me the Windows 8 Boot-Manager with Ubuntu Entry,but grub is unable to find the root partition.

Is there any other work around or solution for this ?

Any help would be appreciated.

Note: The windows 8 boot Manager is sky blue color interactive menu with mouse and other options and windows 7 boot manager is the normal black and white one where you can only use your keyboard

I don't want to install grub because it would prevent my windows 8 from updating as its a genuine MSDN version and various other reasons

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whay you want to do that? even if you do it, after selected ubuntu from windows menu, GRUB will reappear again. So you have to do two steps to boot to ubuntu – Web-E Dec 20 '12 at 4:13
Its fine .. i can set the time out option for grub as 0 so it boots into the default ubuntu kernel – Mevin Babu Dec 20 '12 at 5:05
It seems the graphical boot menu is some sort of pre bootloader environment. Once you select os, it reboots the system and skip this environment. That is why bcdedit can't do anything. I will try it out. :) – Web-E Dec 20 '12 at 5:50
@Web-E Thanks mate for taking up interest.Yeah once you select an OS it reboots directly to that OS.Im wondering if i should make a custom mbr file for this? – Mevin Babu Dec 20 '12 at 6:01

1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote

I just did it in VMPlayer using EasyBCD 2.2. What I did

  1. I installed windows 8 normally using a 20GB parition. Windows also created a system reserved partition.

  2. Boot with ubuntu, created two partition. One for SWAP and one for /. Most important, choose the GRUB location same as the / partition. See pic below, ubuntu from windows 8 loader

  3. Now after installation, open up EasyBCD. Goto Add new menu entry, select Linux tab, choose GRUB2 from dropdown and the disk name where we put the GRUb in step 2. Click on Add Entry

    ubuntu from windows 8 loader

  4. Goto BCD deployment, and write MBR ubuntu from windows 8 loader

  5. Now boot and you should get the screen. I restarted several times, every time I got the GUI boot screen. And ubuntu works also.(I forget to change the name step3) ubuntu from windows 8 loader

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why did u do write MBR ? – Mevin Babu Dec 20 '12 at 15:59
ok, that step wasn't required I think. Just used information from internet & just be to on safe side.:) bcd edit deployment – Web-E Dec 20 '12 at 16:12
I tried this without that MBR part but i couldn't boot into ubuntu :| .Grub was unable to find the root disk. – Mevin Babu Dec 20 '12 at 16:39
you are on uefi? that may be the problem – Web-E Dec 20 '12 at 18:35
Nope.. im not on UEFI .. its an old laptop . – Mevin Babu Dec 21 '12 at 1:34
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