I've just received my Dell Studio 17 laptop, which comes with Windows 7 x64 preinstalled. I'm having quite a hard time installing ubuntu on it.
First of all, here is how I partitioned the drive using GPartEd:
|==Dell utility partition==|==Dell Recovery partition==|==Windows 7==|[==Ubuntu==|==Data partition==]|
Where []
denotes an extended partition.
Here are the steps I completed:
- I used GParted to create this structure, keeping windows 7 installed
- I booted ubuntu LiveCD, and installed it on the right partition
- I let it install grub automatically
- I rebooted intu ubuntu
- I went back to windows 7, no problems
- I then rebooted. Grub was gone.
- I used Super Grub Disk to restore grub, it didn't work.
- I tried to boot into ubuntu from supergrubdisk, but grub couldn't fint the boot folder
- I then reinstalled ubuntu, went through the same steps, but there SGD did boot my ubuntu
- I reverted to the previous version of grub, and installed it on my hard drive
- It worked, but trying to boot win7 got me the "No MBR, press Ctrl+Alt+Del to reboot" error
- I used the windows 7 cd to restore the MBR (the auto wizard didn't work, had to rebuild the mbr from command line
- Now Ubuntu is gone. 7 works fine
- I read a lot about this, and realized that many people could simply not boot win7 again after encountering this problem.
Now I'd like to restore GRUB, but I really won't go through the hassle of doing a full new cycle of installing/reinstalling everything again. Is there a GRUB guru around, to provide me with a detailed guide to not screwing everything up once again?
Thanks a lot!