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Does GRUB corrupt Windows 7?


M_R
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Hello, I have been told on another forum that Windows 7 gets corrupted by GRUB, so I decided to ask people here since you are Linux experts. Can you please explain how or why it happens and if you have discoverd any way to fix this issue. I need to dual boot at work so it's necessary to have both.

 

 

Thank you

Edited by M_R
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No, unfortunately it doesn't. :D

 

Unless you have some laptop with weird partition table (e.g. with a hidden recovery partition in some proprietary/raw filesystem) there should be no issues, and in any case the "troublemaker" should be the new HD partition table, and not grub itself.

The extra partition windows seven are creating by default (regularly showing as "system reserved" in windoze partition manager) should be no problem at all, if you know what you're doing during partitioning.

Edited by scarecrow
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You mean 'fortunately', right? Honestly I prefer Linux and only need Windows for my work. The other needs are perfeclty covered by Linux and OSS applications.How do I check that my partitiontable is not weird or corrupted? Should I post a screenshot of my Partitions as shown by MCC?

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No, I actually do mean "unfortunately", a bit sarcastically, as at most I would use XP for my work.

Seven are close to OK, but unnecessarily and incredibly bloated, while Vista were the worst flavor of windows, ever.

Best way to give us a view of your HD layout: open a root console (kdesu konsole) and type in

fdisk -l

What's the output?

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Oh I see. Yes I agree I was forced to install Win7 because of my Job, but I don't like it either. A lot of software does not work under it.

 

Here is my disc layout. The info is in spanish, so I provided a translation. The spanish terms are marked with * and +

 

Disco* /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cilindros** of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000e517a

Disposit. Inicio***    Comienzo****  	Fin*****  	Bloques******  Id  Sistema*******
/dev/sda1   *   		1      	13  	102400	7  HPFS/NTFS
La particion 1 no termina en un lmite de cilindro.+
/dev/sda2          	13   	23585   189343088+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3   		23586   	60801   298937520	5  Extendida++
/dev/sda5   		23586   	47161   189374188+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6   		47162   	60085   103811998+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda7   		60086   	60801 	5751238+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

 

* Disco means Disc

** cilindros means cylinders

***Disposit. Inicio means start device

****Comienzo menas start

*****Fin means end or finish

******Bloques means blocks

*******Id. Sistema means System Id

+That message says: Partition 1 does not end in a cylinder limit (perhaps 'boundary' is better).

++Extendido means extended

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The actual message translation should be "Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary", as you already mentioned. This is rather particular to fdisk (does not seem to like partitions not ending in cylinder boundaries), but IMO there's nothing wrong with your partition table, and you shouldn't worry.

/dev/sda1 is the "system reserved" win7 partition, /dev/sda2 the actual partition on which win7 are installed. The rest are OK, excluding the swap size, which is huge (approx. 2.8GB, if you used the defaults for block size when creating the partition, while with some moderate RAM size one fifth of that should be perfectly adequate), which you can reduce to save some HD space.

In short: Proceed installing, and when asked at the end of the installation, put grub in the MBR ( /dev/sda )

It should pick and offer the option to boot win7 automatically. If not, fixing grub's configuration is not difficult at all.

Edited by scarecrow
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Thank you. My Ram memory is 4GB. I remember the old days when swap was supposed to be twice as much as the physical RAM you had. So with 4GB I nee only 1GB Swap space? Will it be a problem if I leave it as is (ahem, having a 500GB HD is great as you don't nedd to worry about some petty unused 8/10 GB, ahem)?

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With 4GB RAM you should not bother having a swap partition at all- it's higly unlikely that you'll ever need it. But you can put a very small one in there (say 256 MB) purely for cosmetic reasons.

The only case in which you should need a big swap file, is the case you have a laptop, and want to suspend to disk. In that case, swap is used by default for storing the suspended data, so your swap should be slightly bigger than the physical RAM size. In any other case, you should opt for a tiny swap, or no swap at all.

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What if I must have a WinXP virtual machine running along with KDE 4.5 and several Java Applications (Eclipse, netbeans, etc.) running alongside it in the Host? Oh, and that virtual machine is running Adobe Dreamweaver and Flash?

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If you have a virtual machine running, allocate a chunk of memory, say 1GB to the Windows machine, then you have 3GB rest for the system. You shouldn't be relying on using swap all the time because your system will be slow. If swap is being heavily used all the time, then you need to upgrade your memory from 4GB upwards if you are wanting a Windows virtual machine, eclipse, etc, etc, like you mentioned.

 

Leaving 3GB for the host, and 1GB for Windows would be sufficient. 512MB or 1GB for swap. Providing that you won't use suspend to ram, else you'll need double the physical ram, so 8GB of swap if you want to do that.

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Leaving 3GB for the host, and 1GB for Windows would be sufficient. 512MB or 1GB for swap. Providing that you won't use suspend to ram, else you'll need double the physical ram, so 8GB of swap if you want to do that.

I believe you can suspend to ram without a swap partition, however to suspend to disk your swap partition should be equal to or preferably slightly larger than your physical ram.

The swap = double physical ram is from the 90's when most computers had 2MB's or less of ram and is seldom needed these days.

 

Ken

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...That message says: Partition 1 does not end in a cylinder limit (perhaps 'boundary' is better).

 

Original partitions created by Windows 7 have some relationship to the number 2048. Example, use cfdisk,

 

cfdisk -h 64 -s 32 /dev/sda

 

then press U two or three times and you may see that partitions are done in increments of 2048 bytes.

 

Apparently cfdisk doesn't work if partitions are not aligned with cylinder boundaries.

 

I have some sense that fdisk and cfdisk are not well suited for work on Windows 7 partition tables, but I'm not sure what to do about it.

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