I have a laptop with one HDD, and only W7 installed until I installed Ubuntu Mate (xenial). I used the default installing option from the live session and Grub doesn’t show W7.
I tried with boot-repair and it was a waste of time because it didn’t repair a single thing.
Any tips? Thanks in advance.
This may be a daft question (or, at least, I hope it is a daft question for your sake), but are you certain you have not erased your Win7 partition and now only have UM on there? An easy way to check this is to boot up with the UM live iso and open Gparted and check that both the Win7 and UM partition are there.
I can browse W7 from Ubuntu Mate and see it on Gparted too.
Okay, next question is this. Was the architecture of the live CD you used the same as the architecture of UM you are using? That is to say, if your UM OS is 64 bit, is the UM Live CD you used 64 bit?
Also, while I am it, can you actually boot into your UM OS? If you can, you don’t need to install in the live session. You can actually install it on your OS and run it while logged in.
Just to ensure you are using the correct version, the standalone ISO download link for both architectures is here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/boot-repair-cd/files/
Or if you want to install it directly in your live session or actual OS
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair
I would try it again. If it still doesn’t work, i am at a loss I am afraid. Ive never known it not to work unless there is something really knackered on one or both OS’s.
Yes they are both 64 bit.
I installed boot-repair in the live session because that’s what I read in other topic and I also think it’s better in that way. I used the second link you posted to install boot-repair.
Let me know how it goes
I tried again boot-repair from the installed UM and now I can see and use W7. But I see two loaders (sda1, sda2) why is this? And what’s the difference between these two?
You see two loaders where? In the grub boot menu?
Yes… I see two W7 loaders. They both work but I don’t know why there are two… and which should I use.
So, I take you see them both in the grub menu. How odd.
Okay, try this in a terminal when you are logged into your UM OS:
sudo update-grub
That should re-search and replace your existing grub entries. Hopefully, the double entry will be gone at that point. To check, obviously, you will need to reboot.
Ok, that didn’t work. Still two loaders
Okay
So, the first thing to check is that you are logging in, with each of the loaders, precisely the same OS environment. I suppose, if it were me, a trivial way I would check this is the case it to make some cosmetic changes such as background, theme etc and then reboot into the other loader and see if the changes are persistent. If they are, then, for whatever reason, you seem to have duplicate loaders that the “update-grub” command can’t rectify. It’s never happened to me, but I guess there is a first time for everything
At that point, you could elect to edit your grub.cfg file and delete (or comment out with the hash symbol) one of the windows 7 loaders manually. I have not done this myself (and plenty of people would recommend against it). But there is a link below which tells you how to do it. One thing to check out for, I guess, would be if there were any differences in the content of the loaders in the cfg file as this would indicate there might be subtle but important differences in the W7 environment that they were booting into. On the other hand, if they are completely identical, this might give you a degree confidence that they were indeed simply duplicates.
Personally, so long as they are not affecting anything, I would live with the duplicate loaders. But it’s your choice.
First, take a look at what I got. In GRUB I get this lines
Ubuntu Advanced options for Ubuntu Windows 7 (loader) (/dev/sda1) Windows 7 (loader) (/dev/sda2)
And this a screenshot from Gparted
Okay, regarding the Gparted screenshot, the first entry looks like some kind of Window's system reserved boot partition and the second one looks like the Win7 OS proper.
Regarding the first thing you have shown me:
Ubuntu
Advanced options for Ubuntu
Windows 7 (loader) (/dev/sda1)
Windows 7 (loader) (/dev/sda2)
This is very confusing. Isn't there a seperate grub entry for Win7? What you have shown me there are advanced option in the Ubuntu section of grub?
Can you take, say, a photo (or copy precisely and completely) of the grub menu so that i can see exactly what is on there?
Yes I can but it will be on Spanish and it’s exactly the same that I wrote.
Spanish will be fine. I can run it trough a translator if necessary. Please ensure, however, that you include the complete grub menu entries so that I can see exactly what is being presented to you on screen
Oh, one other thing, when you boot into Win7, do you see both of the ntfs partitions in your file manager? If you do, what are their contents?
You won't need a translator since I tranlated it for you earliar, exept the word "en" wich means "in".
Thanks for that. I am afraid I have run out of ideas now. It’s very confusing and I am just not now sure what is going on and so cannot give advice that I feel confident about. I would be interested to know if both windows partitions are visible when you have used either of the Win7 loaders and, indeed, when you are in the Ubuntu partition. And, if so, what the content of those partitions are. Beyond that, i am at a complete loss as to what is going on. sorry. Hopefully, someone else can come on here and shed some light on the problem.
Well I only see the bigger partion of W while I’m on W7. And in UM it’s the same, just the bigger one. That partition has files and software, the samaller one never really knew about it until now.
