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Having installed windows 8 already on virtual machine, I thought I'd like to see how it actually is, as virtual machine was a bit laggy.

Windows 8 can be installed like any other OS, and it supports dual booting with windows 7. However, it seems to use its own boot up manager, so if I install it, will I be able to boot Ubuntu afterwards?

Can I keep BURG as my bootup loader?

(Referring to this Lifehacker article on setting up a Windows 7 / Windows 8 dual-boot.)

Thanks already beforehand!

Knowledge Cube
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Lassi
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    AS you may have heard or not, Windows 8 has a new Boot up process that prevents other OSes in this Case Linux, to boot. If you have another drive install Linux There, after you've installed Both Windows. – Uri Herrera Jan 09 '12 at 22:43
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    @UriHerrera I believe that's a "BIOS feature", which has been getting a lot of attention on popular weblogs and /. I don't think installing Windows 8 on its own partition should prevent Ubuntu to boot, provided GRUB is configured correctly. – titaniumtux Jan 10 '12 at 03:48
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    @titaniumtux is correct. It is a lockout feature of the BIOS, as far as I know there are currently no BIOS that support this yet.

    You can dual, triple boot with Windows 7/8 and Ubuntu.

    It is best to install Windows 7 first, then Windows 8 then finally Ubuntu.

     – TheXed Jan 11 '12 at 22:49
  • @TheX I'd recommend posting your comment as its own answer below. – Knowledge Cube Jan 11 '12 at 23:41
  • @WarriorIng64 I don't feel it is detailed enough to qualify as an answer, nor do I feel like expunging the energy to make it more detailed :-D – TheXed Jan 11 '12 at 23:51

1 Answers1

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I can't seem to find many details about whether windows 8 still uses bootmgr underneath all that metro, but based on what I can see (having never installed it) I believe it does. There is a surefire (and reverseable) way to check however.

First boot to a live CD or USB of your distro of choice. Then, once booted, determine which harddrive you have Windows 7 installed to.

#ls -la /dev/disk/by-label
#(gparted)&

The first command will list the labels of filesystems linux can recognize and which partition they are on in the form: Label -> /dev/sda1 where 'a' is the drive and '1' is the partition. Next run the following command to save the MBR (boot sector only, no partitions) to a file incase you want to undo these changes later. (Save this file to a thumbdrive maybe) [EDIT: make sure /dev/sda below matches the output of ls for the drive windows 8 is on, e.g., if Windows8 -> /dev/sdc3 then use /dev/sdc]

#dd if=/dev/sda of=/path/to/safe/storage/orig_mbr.bin bs=446 count=1

Now use gparted to make a partition for windows 8 and go through the install procedure for windows 8. Afterwards, boot the live CD or USB again and run:

#dd if=/dev/sda of=/path/to/safe/storage/win8_mbr.bin bs=446 count=1
#dd if=/path/to/safe/storage/orig_mbr.bin of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1

This will back up the Windows 8 MBR and install your old one (thus restoring BURG/GRUB/LILO/etc). You can now boot whatever linux you have on that box and attempt to do your bootloader's update / OS probe procedure. If Windows 8 is detected (or multiple Windows OSes are detected) then Windows 8 uses the same boot procedure as Windows 7 (called bootmgr) and you can continue to use your current bootloader. If not, then you may try to manually chainload it like you would for ntdlr and windows XP.

Huckle
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  • It does use the same boot loader, metro is just a desktop environment, much like Unity or Gnome-Shell is a desktop environment. – TheXed Jan 11 '12 at 22:55