Windows 7 and Grub

booman

booman

Grand High Exalted Mystic Emperor of Linux Gaming
Staff member
I was trying to free up some space on my hard drive and noticed Windows folder was 24 Gigs.
That is friggin HUGE!!! :mad:
So did some research and found that the winsxs folder had a bunch of archived updates.
Did some deleting and freed up 8 Gigs of space...
BAD IDEA!
Little did I know, those "archives" actually had residual data for each program installed.
Nothing will launch.... I know, I know this isn't a Windows forum. ;)

So I re-installed Windows 7 64-bit and now Grub won't launch anymore because NTLoader has probably written over it.

I've messed with this in the past and basically gave up..
Mint 14 is still intact on my Samsung SSD drive, but I would like to get Grub fixed so I can dual-boot again.
 
Yeah, that is a tough problem. Basically, Windows wants to own the MBR, and it isn't very friendly about it, so it should be installed first, before GRUB/Linux.

I did have a similar problem once before, and did some research. I found some accounts of being able to fix Windows overwriting the MBR, but I don't remember where, so I'll have to look around and see if I can find them again. I was not able to successfully recover, though. I restored my weekly disk image instead. Lost some data, but it was far less painful than the proposed fix.

That being said, last week I ran across a distro called 'Rescatux' that claims to have an MBR restore/rebuild function, among other tools. I have not tried it. You could download it; it burns to a CD and boots from there, then you can run all kinds of restore tools from the CD.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/rescatux.berlios/

http://www.supergrubdisk.org/rescatux/
 
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My Mint 14 isn't critical because I backup all of my guides. I was playing Borderlands and would like to backup the save game.
I can probably do this with Live Disk

So I don't mind installing Mint but if there was an easy way to set Grub again, I don't mind doing that.

I have tried it before and it was such a pain!

My wife really needs this computer for her photography business, so I really had to install Windows again.
 
You can access all your data in Mint through a Live Disk, and even copy it all over to a usb stick. But for fixing Grub, I don't think that is so easy. I am not perfectly sure, but I believe you would have to chroot into your Mint install from a Live Disk. Have you tried searching on the Mint forums, or maybe even the Ubuntu forums might have information.

The Arch wiki have quite a lot of information about this, but then again that information might not be helpful to you. I can leave the link if you want to look at it: Arch Wiki dual-booting GRUB

But I would suggest you try to find something on Mint/Ubuntu forums, if you search there then I suspect there is a chance someone has encountered something similar.
 
I ended up installing Mint 16 64-bit
Yes I said it! Sixty Four Bit! I actually did it!
This is a test because next I have to install the 32-bit libraries for games and then install Wine, PlayOnLinux and then some games for testing.

If for any reason I get a lot of resistance, then back to Mint 14 I go until Mint 17 is here.

Windows 7 is back up and now everything is GREAT.
 
Glad to hear things are working again. Most 32-bit libraries usually install as dependencies for other programs. Steam is a 32-bit program, and installing that will automatically pull in several 32-bit libraries.
 
Ooh nice.
I know how to install 32-bit libs in Ubuntu, but it seems Mint 16 has a few changes.
Not so easy to install multi-arch apparently
 
Worst case scenario, you'll just have to search for them in the software manager, or just install with apt-get from terminal as long as you know the names of the packages.
 
Thats the problem, how would I know all the names?
Ubuntu was great at combining all of them into one big package.

Does this guide explain what I need to do?
Multiarch
 
That topic is on the Mint Debian part of the forums, and I suspect things might work a bit differently with regular Mint. For the most part, installing 32-bit software will pull in any 32-bit dependencies when you install the software, as long as you install from official repositores of course.

I don't know if things were more difficult with earlier Mint versions, but it is my impression that the 64-bit version works without any issues.

Anyway, I have a 64-bit mint 16 install in virtualbox currently (along with a couple other OS), so I could always look into it if you struggle with something. Although I can't actually play any games in virtualbox as it does not have direct access to my gpu.
 
I found a forum post that ia32-libs is available via software manager.
Downloading and installing now.

Apparently Ubuntu removed multi-arch 32-bit libraries from the package manager.
Not sure why, but Mint developers added it to the Mint packages.

I'll post if they do/don't work
I'm going to start a new Thread in Installing Linux forum
 
Strange because Mint forums claims that Ubuntu removed it
 
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