Installing CentOS 7 Over Win7 In A Dual-boot Enviornment.

I had Kali and Linux Mint installed and erased Mint to install Centos7. Grub was totally deleted and I could only boot into grub recovery. Many hours of cussing later I got Kali back, I can see Centos filesystem mounted on my desktop and in disk utility. I never finished setting Centos up as I was rushed out the door which probably caused the problem in the first place, for some reason it's raid and although it's 2 harddrives they are not set up for raid and 1 is Kali and 1 is Centos. The Centos boot folder is still empty after running grub-install on it twice and it does not show in grub. How do I get Centos as an option?

I just tried Mint again and its still not up to what I need. So, can I install another linux to replace Mint and not loose my win7?

2, 3, and 5 years ago, I tried linux and once I realized it did not do what i needed, I tried to remove it (taking advice from the forums) and I lost access to win7. I dont want that to happen again.

How should I proceed?

pa

Hi, So im quite new to linux and im not surprised as iv tried before to check it out and failed then (old computers problem) but i decided to have another go on a new comp recently.

UEFI mobo
Nvidia geforce 770 as output.

I need a duel boot of win7 & mint. Win7 is installed.

UEFI has caused me so many problems its just beyond me ! (i had never heard of it before i brought this comp)

booting Mint from a cd/dvd works fine.

booting from a USB fails with a blank or locked up screen at the first mint logo. (many tests with dif methods of creating live USB)

Installing mint with grub over the top of win boot loader fails , i get no options to choose between win & linux it boots straight to linux and then fails (same error as above)

I have a small SSD with win7 , there is not a lot of space on it so i want to install mint 17.1KDE on a different HDD.

After a month or so of reading testing reading testing etc i ended up getting mint installed on partitions i created on secondary HDD but i had to keep the windows boot loader in place and use easyBCD.

However now i get the choice of win7 or linux and windows still actually works (breakthrough ^^) BUT linux just crashes at boot (at the first logo) and then the monitor looses all signal?


I am soo frustrated. Mint will run of a CD but i can not get it to work in any other way , please help

Thx.

Did it again!

Last week, with help from this forum, I was able to install Linux Mint 17.1 dual boot with Windows 8.1. It worked so well, I decided to explore other Linux distros recommended by forum members as some I wanted to check out.

I was using Unetbootin to download and install these as live sessions on my Windows 8.1 partition.

On my last such download, something went wrong, and no doubt I caused the error, but no clue as to how.

When I opened up this PC, I got the normal dual boot option for Windows and Mint. When I selected Windows, I found an additional dual boot option between it and Unetbootin! Somehow I created a partition (?) on my C Drive for Unetbootin (see Thumbnail below).
This Unetbootin option only goes to a page for me to choose another OS. Further, when I rebooted, the Windows/Mint dual boot option no longer existed, just the Windows/Unetbootin one.

Been checking out various articles and websites about BCD/MBR repair, but nothing definitive (that I can understand) about modifying these to delete the Unetbootin partition and restoring the Windows/linux dual boot.

Naturally, this is a newbie land mine area, so I'm very reluctant to try anything I can't fully understand, which is the category everything I've Googled on this topic falls into.

Anyone know how I can resolve this short of a complete start over
installation based on steps that basically a PC fence post can follow?

TIA
Cheers!

I'm quite new to Linux, and after a lot of trials ended up with Mint Mate (dual boot with Win7). I've been using it for a few weeks now with no real problems.
However, I've just transferred my system to a new pc case. The only alteration I made was to change the sata connector cable from sata 1 to sata 0. When I tried to boot to Mint I got screen after screen of errors (all unintelligible to me). I tried the recovery boot and got even more screens of errors. I did once get a desktop showing but it wouldn't actually do anything. So I'm now unable to open Mint – it just says there is an error on the disk drive.
Thank goodness for Win7! That opened first time, no problems – and continues to open fine (and I can access and copy files from there).
Obviously after such a catastrophic experience with Mint I'm going to always stick with dual boot. Unfortunately I'm now very reluctant to trust Linux with anything important – though I do want to go on using it for internet access. Can someone recommend a really stable (but easy to use) Mate distro please? Thank you.

Hi,

I am new to the installation of Linux, and wish to install 3 different distro's on the same hard disk.

I have installed Centos 7 successfully as follows :

The /boot is /dev/sda2

/dev/sda1 is listed as unknown so i assume it is the Master Boot Record with Grub installed. I do obtain the option to boot to the various kernels after updating the OS.

/dev/sda3 is a Linux LVM with the various partitions i required.

When i installed the CentOS 7 the installer stated an error about the bootable partition - which was effectively /boot, so i moved this to /dev/sda2.

What i am not sure about is that if i want to install 2 other Linux OS's will i run out of /dev/sdaX assignments ?.

I read somewhere that there are 4 maximum that can be used a /boot (SDA1, SDA2, SDA3, SDA4), so does this mean i can only install one other OS ?.

Any guidance gratefully received. Thanks.

Regards,

Richard.

I have a Toshiba Laptop that had a Dual Boot of Windows 7 and Linux Mint 17 on it and both OS's worked fine. I've been wanting to use CentOS 7 as my primary OS so that I can become more familar with RPM management and proceeded to remove my Mint installation and replace it with the CENTOS 7 installation, and the install completed successfully. HOWEVER, here's my problem.....

When my laptop starts up, I don't see GRUB nor do I have any option of selecting whether to run Windows or CentOS. It automatically loads up Centos 7. When I do a 'sudo fdisk -l', I can see that SDA1 is an NTFS drive, and when I try the following 'sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/Main\ Drive' I get an error message saying that I can't mount an NTFS drive.

Am I missing something or is there a way to access my Windows files from within Centos. I was able to do this with Mint without an issue, but unable to see any of my windows drives because I can't mount an NTFS drive.

I have no problem with keeping CENTOS as my only OS on this laptop, however, I do need to access the files from the Window's partition, and if anyone can help me to access my files, that would be totally awesome.

Thank you in advance for reading through this and for any help offered.....

Mikey

Hello All. This is my first post here. I am worse than a newbie; I'm a PC dinosaur! Not joking either.
Recently got a Dell Inspiron 3048 with Windows 8.1 pre installed. As I am a die hard XP user (my other PC is a Dell Dimension 2400), and seeing that PC's days may be numbered, I want to start using Linux, and decided Mint 17.1 would be first on the list.
Ordered a Linux Mint 17.1 boot disk and went to install it. At the option for a dual boot with Windows, I got lost, and did not understand the "other" choice versus making Linux the only OS on the PC. I wound up wiping my HDD and lost contact with Windows 8.1. Fortunately, the Dell Tech I got at Dell Support was able to walk me through getting Windows back up, but the only way I can now access Mint 17.1 is with the boot disk, but there is no set up options as it is already set up, even though incorrectly for a dual boot.
How do I wipe out Linux without losing Windows 8.1 as well so I can re install Linux and this time make the correct selection for a dual boot?
Anyone willing to respond please do so small and slow so I can follow.
TIA.
BTW, I have tried installing Zorin OS 9 Ultimate on my XP machine via DVD and USB, but I can't get past the f1/f2 loop, even though I have reconfigured my boot sequence according to the drive I'm installing from. Zorin support has been MIA on this. Anyone having a similar problem?
Cheers

I have installed centos7 in my laptop but after installing i cannot boot into my windows OS .
Even there is no grub entry for it but my windows partitions are intake .

I have an old debian distro installed on hard disk. The distro is on sda1 partition. I also have Win7 on a seperate hard disk which is on sdb1.
When I boot up, GRUB bootloader opens up and gives me the option to select either OS.

So I recently installed a new debian distro and put into my sda2 partition.
But now when I boot up, GRUB only sees the new distro in sda2 and I can't access the distro in sda1 or Win7 in sdb1.

On one thread someone said mounting the partitions and then using 'update-grub' will resolve the problem.
I tried it and re-booted, but GRUB still only offers the newly installed distro in sda2.

Can someone help please?