Yippie! We DID IT! And Here is HOW TO I think I am about beside myself with JOY! I just took the plung Richie, and installed Fedora Core 11. I had to modify the GRUB Boot Loader to make it work. At first, it looked like I lost the bootmgr (boot manager) for Windows 7, but it was just a matter of modifying the GRUB boot loader. As I said, I am not a genious when it comes to recognizing all the meticulous drive numbering system(s) within Linux, but I took a chance and WON! I thought that this is an excellent post here on the Windows7Forums and I might document what I did so that other Windows 7 users can take up the lead on this to get a working dual boot configuration going for themselves. So here is the detail of what I did, after working with Richie here who gets a chunk of the credit for encouraging me to go ahead, even though I was fearful I would loose the Windows 7 boot loader which resides in the MBR of the primary hard disk (SATA 1) on which my Windows 7 is installed.
I had a big fear here because right now Windows 7 is so new that there is little to NOTHING on the net with anyone else suggesting on how to do this. So let me be one of the first people to post a HOW TO on how to do this and make it work with Windows 7.
PREPARATION: The first thing you want to do is get a good backup software. I already had purchased Acronis True Image Home 2010 because I have always believed in thoroughly backing up things anyway. So I went ahead when I bought Windows 7 Ultimate and purchased a copy of Acronis True Image Home 2010 (
Server backup and disaster recovery solutions for Windows and Linux OSs, onsite system protection). The important thing is to make sure you have all your hardware issues in Windows 7 solved first. I had a minor issue with an external USB hard disk not being detected. Once that was solved, everything else fell into place in Windows 7. First thing that I did was to make a Windows 7 Boot Disk with Acronis. I tested this disk on reboot to make sure I could reboot with this emergency disk first). Get into BIOS and set your first boot device as your ROM drive, save the change in BIOS and then boot into the Acronis Emergency CD/DVD or thumb drive (as it may be). This way, you know you are covered in case the Linux install fails and you loose the Windows 7 boot file in the MBR. Next thing I did, was to make a complete system backup image to DVD's of all the partitions on my primary drive, so that in case of failure, I could completely reinstall Windows 7, if necessary, first by booting into the Acronis Boot Disk (emergency disk) and then restoring all the partitions on my primary drive with the latest backup on DVD. Since I have a relatively new install of Windows 7, I only have about 38 Gigs of data to compress. I used the Maximum Compression feature in Acronis, to get the number of required DVD's down to just 3 DVD's (four total, with the boot disk). Now that I had this backup to rely on, a lot of my fears faded away...I could afford to experiment without committing digital suicide going into unknown territory! So my first advice to anyone who does this is...create an emergency boot disk, where the MBR is backed up and make a complete image of all your partitions so that you can, if all else fails, restore your Windows 7 system.
Second. Go into device manager. I happen to have 4 internal SATA drives and one external SATA. SATA1 on the motherboard is the first hard drive and it is the hard disk with Windows 7 on it. Don't forget that Windows 7 creates a special 100 Mb RESERVED partition (I think this must be a lot like the SWAP partition in Linux). You need to make sure your backup to disk also backs up this partition too. Anyway, since I have 5 hard disks, I needed to make sure that I was not going to overwrite or wipe out my Windows 7 install. So I clicked on each hard disk in device manager (in the run box, type "device manager" without quotes and bring up the device manager. Go to DISK DRIVES, and write down the SERIAL NUMBER for each hard disk. Each hard disk has an internal serial number and device manager will show this.
This is critical in making sure you don't wipe out your Windows 7 hard disk! Right click, PROPERTIES, go to the VOLUMES tab and click on POPULATE button and confirm all the information. Write down on a piece of paper your DRIVE LETTER followed by the SERIAL NUMBER of the device and which disks contain what on your system. In my case, I have three 500 gig hard disks to mess with and nothing on them, so I decided that I would dedicate one whole hard disk to a Linux O/S install. This meant, I didn't have to try to squeeze Linux onto my primary (C) drive by having to make room (resize the partition to make room on it). If all you have is just one hard disk, you are going to run into problems because Windows now requires TWO partitions on a single hard drive where the operating system resides (the 100 mb RESERVED partition and the partition with Windows 7 itself). Linux requires three partitions: /boot partition, /root partition, SWAP partition. This would add up to 5 partitions, which violates the maximum of 4 partitions per hard disk device rule, So now, in order to get Linux installed you are going to have to have a second hard disk, one that only has one current partition at the most on it and no more (since if you are going to use a second hard disk for windows too, you will have to have at least one primary partition on the secondary disk, right, formatted NTFS?). This would leave you with three remaining partitions which is what you need in Linux, as I mentioned earlier. However, I would recommend that you do not put any windows files on the secondary hard disk and just let Linux install entirely on that hard disk. Not to fear, if you have already formatted NTFS on the secondary drive and have only files you can toss out or sacrifice, you can merely let Linux wipe the secondary drive and format the drive with one of several Linux file systems. I happen to have some prior Linux experience and I chose the Ext3 file system because it is a journaled file system, like NTFS, it stores the pointers to files in a database like file strucutre, which improves stability and reliability. Even though Ext4 is out, newer file systems sometimes have bugs in them, so staying with an older form of file system type, adds a level of assurance it is more stable and much less bug prone.
Ok, so if you didn't have a second hard disk, then get one! Even if you have an older one sitting around you aren't using.
Linux is very good at detecting hardware and will easily detect a secondary HD device.
There are many MANY flavors of Linux, but the one I like the best is Fedora Core (Red Hat).
Fedora Project You can download the full iso of either the 32 or 64 bit version and use imageburn (a free utility),
The Official ImgBurn Website, to write an iso DVD. I suggest the DVD since if you do it with CD's it will require 6 of them. I have found from past installs, that CD installations are more prone to "disk not found" and I/O readying errors...which more often than not leads to a failed or corrupted install of Linux. It is far better to download the DVD version and burn it to a single DVD and get rid of the idea of having to eject CD's and input CD's. You can also take a shortcut like I did...I went to Barnes and Noble Bookstore and bought a copy of the DVD in a Fedora magazine (in the B&N magazine section). This saves me the trouble of downloading, burning and running a hash check to make sure all 3.6 gigs of data are not corrupted. So whether you do it the hard way by downloading and burning the latest iso or you do it the e-z way like I did and just buy it, is up to you. There are also services on the internet where you can purchase a burned iso copy for a small charge + shipping.
I decided that one whole hard disk would be dedicated to Linux. I made sure I had the serial number for the device so that when the Fedora Linux Installer (Called Anaconda) gets to the disk detection and partitioning section, I would know right away which disk was which. In the Linux convention of naming devices, Sda is my first hard disk, and if you read back, Richie also mentioned this. This also happens to be hd0 in GRUB (The Grand Unified Bootloader) in Linux. All these conventions and names can be confusing! So you might want to do a little net read to familiarize yourself with the device naming conventions in Linux before doing this...In my case, I decided I would sacrifice F drive to Linux as the test guinea pig device. I took Richie's advice to install GRUB into the MBR of my primary Sda device (where windows is installed). This effectively overwrites the Windows 7 bootloader file in the MBR and replaces it with GRUB. Now, the fact is, that I added a /BOOT partition to my Windows F drive (in Linux, this turned out to be Sdb drive, or the second drive in my system...note the "b" rather than the "a"). This means that the boot is passed to the /BOOT partition of the secondary drive from GRUB. OK, See the next post, they will only allow me 10,000 characters!