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Restore Grub After Installing Windows 7

Dual booting. It can be a wonderful thing or a horrible nightmare. With Windows 7, users may have more than one reason to want the ability on their HTPC machines. Especially if several pieces of hardware just don't work as they should in Ubuntu.

The trick is, Windows 7, by default, wants to be the ONLY OS on your computer, even if you've already installed other OSes. My recommendation? Install Windows 7 first, in a carefully planned partition (create using Ubuntu LiveCD and GParted, of course), and then install Ubuntu.

But what if you just HAD to install Ubuntu first in that secondary partition and now need to install Windows? Windows will erase your Grub settings from the boot sector. This means no more ability to boot into Ubuntu. Oh No!

Not to worry, there's an easy way to recover from said disaster. I found this excellent post and here are the details for archival purposes:

This post discusses the easy way of restoring Grub2 using Ubuntu Live CD. First, boot with the Ubuntu Live CD. Now mount the partition, which has Ubuntu installed on it. If you had a separate partition for /boot, then you would have to mount that too. Mounting the partitions is super easy. Just go to Places in the top Gnome menu and try browsing to your corresponding partition by clicking on it. It would automatically get mounted and open in nautilus.

Now just run the following command to install Grub2 in the Master Boot Record (MBR) of your first booting hard drive.

sudo grub-setup -d /media/XXXXX/boot/grub -m /media/YYYYY/boot/grub/device.map /dev/sda

Where XXXXX represents the name or UUID of the partition that you have mounted. If your /boot partition is separate from your / partition then YYYYY above would be different from XXXXX, else both of them would be identical. The command above assumes that /dev/sda is your primary or first device in hard disk boot order. If not then replace it with /dev/sdb or sd_ fill the blank with appropriate letter.

After you have run the command, reboot and you should be able to boot in Ubuntu but not in Windows, to fix it run the following command in a terminal and Grub boot list would be updated to include Windows in it. Also if you want to change boot order read this.

sudo update-grub

Now reboot and you should have the choice to boot in both Windows and Ubuntu.

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