Getting Ubuntu to Boot *AFTER* installing Windows 7

Photo Credit: fallsroad - http://www.flickr.com/photos/fallsroad/13240207/From Google, and the various Linux community forums, this is a fairly common problem so, in an effort to be more useful than those who simply post a link to the GRUB man page, or an article which spells out how dumb it is to install Windows AFTER Ubuntu – I thought I’d drop my experience and the resolution here – I’m bound to need it at some point in the future.

The Fix:

While the suggested Boot-Repair GUI didn’t do the trick for me, the following  did result in an eventual #WIN.

  • Boot from a Ubuntu LIVE CD/USB
  • From a terminal, enter the following
    • sudo fdisk -l
    • This will identify the device / drive. For me (and most users) this will tend to be /dev/sda
    • If you are still uncertain you can also run sudo blkid for more details and review the partition labels & sizes
  • Mount the Ubuntu boot partition
    • sudo mount /dev/sdXY /mnt
    • e.g. sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
  • Run grub-install as below to drop the GRUB2 files back onto the boot partition where they should reside
    • sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sdX
    • e.g. sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda
  • Reboot (into your freshly resurrected Ubuntu installation)
  • Open a terminal and refresh the GRUB2 menu with:
    • sudo update-grub
  • That’s it.. you SHOULD now have both Ubuntu and Windows 7 detected at boot and be able to choose between them.

Thanks to the Ubuntu Community for this page – and all the others which pointed to different solutions and variants of this fix. If the above doesn’t work for you, Google is your friend – there’s a heap more articles out there which should offer you an eventual solution.


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