CenTOS 7 Dual Boot With Windows

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

hiiii all

I had installed Windows 7 on /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 and then I installed Centos 7.
Since then I cant find Windows entry in the Grub.
And i had tried to use all kind of solution found on the net I still cant see any entry.
I had edited 40_custom script adding:

cat <<EOF
menuentry "windows 7" {
insmod part_msdos
insmod ntfs
set root='hd0,msdos1'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root FCDAE998DAE95006
chainloader +1
}
EOF

then this command grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub2.cfg

[root@localhost]# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub2.cfg
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.10.0-123.el7.x86_64
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-3.10.0-123.el7.x86_64.img
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-93890f189dec4b309c004fdce969ca5a
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-0-rescue-93890f189dec4b309c004fdce969ca5a.img

then this
[root@localhost]# tail -10 /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
# the 'exec tail' line above.
### END /etc/grub.d/40_custom ###

### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/41_custom ###
if [ -f ${config_directory}/custom.cfg ]; then
source ${config_directory}/custom.cfg
elif [ -z "${config_directory}" -a -f $prefix/custom.cfg ]; then
source $prefix/custom.cfg;
fi
### END /etc/grub.d/41_custom ###
[root@localhost]#


Still cant find windows in grub
please help me with this guys
thanks

Hello!

TL;DR: Deleted Linux partition from Windows. Stuck at Grub rescue prompt.

I'm sorry to trouble you guys, because I'm an idiot.

So I'm wanting to dual-boot Kalilinux and Windows 8.
I went through the steps such as creating a bootable USB, changing the
boot order and so on. I get into Kali, start Gparted and try to partition stuff.

I'm far from an expert, so I wasn't sure what to do. Long-story short, I
didn't seem to get Kali installed correctly, due to something with an EFI
drive being required. So I boot into windows and then stupidly, because it said in the guide,try to "uninstall" Kali by removing it's partition, inside Win8 haha... So I did.

Now I simply get the Grub rescue command prompt when I boot from the same
USB and I have no idea how to fix it. I've run bootrec.exe/fixmbr in Windows haha,
for what it's worth. However Grub can't find any partition it says.

In windows, I have like... 2-3 Recovery partitions. Does anyone know how to remove
them??? I've tried to clear as much as I can, besides the C drive and Auxillary D drive.

Any advice would be very appreciated.

Hi,

Before installing Linux Mint 17 to the entire HDD of my HP p2 1317cb desktop, it was running a preinstalled windows 8 OEM UEFI. After several failed attempts of dual booting(no grub menu and boots directly to the windows 8) i then decided to do a erase all and install Linux option. Now i have Linux Mint 17.1 working flawlessly, so far. What i want to now do is, dual boot a windows 7 installation alongside my Linux. Please advise on the best way to do this.
Thank You.

Note: Before doing a clean install of Linux i disabled secure boot,enabled legacy, and disabled fast boot.

Please Help,

I have a Windows 7 and Fedora 20 dual boot pc .
Today i deleted the fedora partition from windows disk management and then restarted my pc.
Now i am stuck in the 'grub rescue > ' screen ...... It is showing 'no such partition ' , after searching through the internet i tried these commands......

grub rescue > set boot=(hd0,msdos6)

grub rescue> set prefix=(hd0,msdos6)/*boot/grub

grub rescue> insmod normal (after this line ,i am getting the error , grub rescue > unknown filesystem)

grub rescue> normal

Don't know what to do ,but i want to get back to the windows os first ,also i don't have the windows or fedora live cd . My Windows recovery is stored in my pc hard drive....... plzz help so that i can resolve this issue

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?

Hi all:

Yes, my first post and I am sure to make mistakes. Here goes.

Regarding suggestions for Linux Screencasts forum. I constantly struggle with dual boot with Windows. I read so many blogs that my eyes cross. Its even more confusing now with UEFI partitions. It happened today and now Windows is not booting. Screencasts sound like a windfall.

What I need to know:

1. Exactly where are the dual boot files located?
2. Where are examples of working dual boot files?
3. What tools do I need to access dual boot files when my system is not working?
4. If I use Windows tools to fix Windows boot then Fedora boot is overwritten. What do I need to watch?
5. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.

There are my suggestions for today. Hope it generates food for thought. :-)

Hello everyone,
Recently, I installed Linux Mint 17 (Cinnamon) on my HP dv6 Laptop. During installation Linux was not detecting my original Windows 7 and was attempting to occupy the entire hard disk. So I used the "Something Else" option to manually create separate partitions for Linux (Previously I had allocated around 120 GB free space for Linux using Windows Disk Management). This installed the Linux but after booting it does not detect Windows 7 and directly boots to Mint. I have tried installing and updating the grub but it did not help either.
Please Help...

I have a similar problem. I had Windows 7 and Centos 5.5 installed on same disk /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 and then I installed Centos 7 instead.
Since then I cant find Windows entry in the Grub.

After creating a bootable usb using Universal USB Installer. I booted up the sytstem (Dell Inspiron N4110) F12 boot on usb, did the install, everything went well until after copying files and then the error message that "The grub-pc package failed to install into /target.. So i continued without a boot loader and now am trying to figure out how to get it back.
Previously i did a perfect dual boot of Kali Linux wherein the Grub boot loader was present. I did however uninstall Kali, reclaim HDD space, and even use EasyBCD to remove Grub(i believe).
Also worth noting is that before this dual boot with pignuy and after uninstalling kali linux i did a complete reinstallation of my windows 7 system using the recovery HD.

Now i would like to know how i could get grub boot loader back onto my system so that i can boot up Pinguy OS. Thanks