Have been using ubuntu mate 14. 4 duel booted with win 7 successfully for over a year. I then reinstalled Mate on to an SSD drive and left 7 on it’s own drive. This has been working well until I let Mate upgrade to 16.04.
I then lost my Duel Boot grub and could only boot into Mate, which is running OK.
I was able to reinstall the MBR for windows and can boot into 7 as a separate HD.
My problem now is that Ubuntu Boot repair will not work, either from a disk or from within Mate.
It opens and then stops at the “Scan system os-prober” window, it just rolls round and never stops, have used the very latest versions, both 64 and 32 bit, but nothing gets past the first scan.
The os-prober scan you mention is part of grub, and is run by grub-update as i recall.
IMO grub is a disaster (and systemd sucks eggs). Because of that, what i’d do in your situation is boot up a recovery USB stick and then run a homegrown utility to perform the boot setup; since that tool is unavailable, because ncurses isn’t available for PHP-7 which is the version in the repo, it’s a bit tougher. Without it, what i personally do is reinstall Ubuntu-MATE on the SSD just where it is now, but a fresh install will probably resolve the boot issue, the installer seems pretty good at that.
In my relatively brief experience with linux, it is always better to do a full fresh install than to allow an upgrade to a new version. I can’t cite details, but every time i’ve allowed a full version update, i’ve ended up with more space used for something not as reliable as the previous version. Maybe it’s just my perception of things.
All the usual disclaimers apply, i’ve forgotten all the clues i used to have about Windows and multi-boot setups that include Windows, intentionally and with extreme prejudice. 
[quote=“Gege, post:1, topic:12197”]
I then lost my Duel Boot grub and could only boot into Mate, which is running OK.I was able to reinstall the MBR for windows and can boot into 7 as a separate HD.[/quote]
? Do you boot to Win 7 using a bios drive selector?
I’ve found that using grub for my dual boot situation is not to my liking; I have MATE 16.04 default boot and when I need Win 7 I choose a quick boot selector on my HP tower activated by pressing escape during POST and select the Win 7 HD. This is just an extremely minor issue in my setup, if I need to be using Windows 7 a majority of the time ll I need to do is set the primary boot disk in full bios setup.
Hi pfeiffep, thanks for you interest, yes i have to boot to windows from bios and the low number of times i have to use it, i may leave it that way.
My main interest is why i can;t get “Boot repair” to work
Cheers
Hi crankypuss, thanks for your input, I agree with not doing an OS update, they have always been a problem, but doing a fresh install involves doing a lot of app installation again as well, so i thought I’d give the update a try this time, apart from loosing the duel boot grub everything went well.
I would like to find out why the “Boot Repair” program won’t work, though, as I have used it many times before.
Cheers