Problem with Multiboot Win7 Ultimate/UM 16.04.02 LTS/UM 17.04

Support & Help Requests
1

Hello again all!

I am having a recurring problem with Win7 on my multiboot system which causes 17.04 to drop into busybox on every boot AFTER running Win7.

This problem does not affect UM 16.04.02 on sda2
It damages the file system on UM 17.04 on sda3
Win7 resides on sdb1

This is both predictable and repeatable and, has me scared to death of booting into Win7 any more.

I was forced to reinstall 17.04 just two days ago, when the filesystem was too damaged after running Win7, to recover. Whatever is happening REALLY did a number on UM17.04’s filesystem. The new install was running PERFECTLY until I needed to run Win7 for a class earlier today. As soon as I shut down (I always do a full power-off shutdown) and restarted (choosing 17.04 from the grub menu) I was instantly dumped into the intranfs prompt again.

Fortunately this time, fsck /dev/sda3 was able to recover from (pages and pages) of damaged data. But, I simply cannot go on like this.

Can anyone offer any possible causes for this behaviour?
Why does it only affect the 17.04 installation on sda3 but, never touches the 16.04.02 on sda2?
How can I stop it, short of deleting windows altogether?

2

Interesting and unusual behavior.

Are you using the same file system type for both installations?

Have you considered running Windows in a VM? If the machine is the same as the one you listed the specs for in the SPECS thread, you surely have the hardware resources to do that.

3

Thank you for your reply.
I do not think the “file system type” is different. Each partition is formatted ext4, if that is what you mean. Of course, Win7 is on a separate drive down the chain. Apologies If I am misunderstanding your meaning.

I do not currently, have any understanding of how VMs work and how to set them up. So, I have not tried it.
But, I do understand that; if I am unable to boot into Linux (for any reason), I will also not be able to access the Win7 OS. The prospect of having one OS depend upon another OS to operate is frightening at my current level of expertise.

I would really like to just find a way to stop this “spooky action” between Win7 and UM17.04.