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posting this question after three days searching online and trying various things.

I have two physical drives (each a 480GB SSD), one with Ubuntu 14.04, one with WIN7. I would like to get a choice to boot into one of the OS via either GRUB2 or EasyBCD - no preference. I have not had much success configuring either. Pressing the power button gets me into Ubuntu with no further attention required, pressing DEL at startup allows me to enter the UEFI BIOS and boot the WIN7 disk (SATA in IDE mode). The ONLY time I get the Windows Boot Manager screen is after I go into the BIOS and select the WIN7 drive to boot - not much point to that. I have not seen the grub screen ever.

Here's my fdisk -l output (see also the tabulated representation from GParted further down):

Disk /dev/sda: 480.1 GB, 480103981056 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 58369 cylinders, total 937703088 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1   937703087   468851543+  ee  GPT

Disk /dev/sdb: 480.1 GB, 480103981056 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 58369 cylinders, total 937703088 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x05eaa1a0

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *        2048      206847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdb2          206848   937699327   468746240    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

Here's some things I have tried and encountered:

In EasyBCD, I added Ubuntu and Neogrub as New Entries. Entry #2 Ubuntu I put as Device: boot rather than C:. The Neogrub (#Entry #3) configuration file menu.lst looked like this:

default 1
timeout 30

title Ubuntu
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-3.13.0-48-generic ro root= /dev/sda2
initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.13.0-48-generic


title Windows 7
root (hd1,0)
makeactive
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1
boot

The initrd.img-3.13.0-48-generic seemed to be an archive (message: cannot open with Archive Manager). I pressed BCD Deployment and Write MBR under MBR Configuration Options for the "Install Windows7 bootloader to the MBR" radiobutton. Here is my final EasyBCD summary:

There are a total of 3 entries listed in the bootloader.

Default: Windows 7
Timeout: 30 seconds
EasyBCD Boot Device: C:\

Entry #1
Name: Windows 7
BCD ID: {current}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.exe

Entry #2
Name: Ubuntu
BCD ID: {2ea417e1-d5e2-11e4-b820-a9e2042696c7}
Device: boot
Bootloader Path: \NST\AutoNeoGrub0.mbr

Entry #3
Name: NeoGrub Bootloader
BCD ID: {2ea417e2-d5e2-11e4-b820-a9e2042696c7}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \NST\NeoGrub.mbr 

I installed grub2 following this tutorial, but did not seem to work it out. I did update grub2.

I also tried an automatic fix via boot-repair, but got messages asking me to create a BIOS-Boot partition (think I already have this? -see the output from GParted below), and "disable Secure Boot in BIOS" (could not see anything like that in my BIOS):

Partition    File system   Mount Point    Size     Flags
/dev/sda1    FAT32         /boot/efi)     512 MB   Boot
/dev/sda2    ext4          /              414 GB   
/dev/sda3     linux-swap                   32 GB

I guess those are the main things. After 3 days of installing Ubuntu, reinstalling Windows and troubleshooting various things, I feel pretty stuck and directionless. Thanks in advance for any tips.

1 Answer 1

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I See the topic is rather old, but maybe the problem is still up;

I have the same configuration myself; 2 ssd's, one with windows and one with ubuntu. EasyBCD did not work for me.

I'am using Grub2.

sudo apt-get install grub2

And then I installed grub customizer https://launchpad.net/grub-customizer to make sure the right entries are there and that the resolution is set to my display.

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  • Thanks @Thom Mekelenkamp for answering. It is a while ago since I posted this, but I think in the end I ran Boot-Repair enough times to fix the problems. Hopefully grub customizer will help someone else.
    – ptenax
    Aug 6, 2015 at 6:13

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