Dual Boot on a HP Pavilion DV6T

[prjmgk]

I received my dv6t from the factory with Windows 7 on it. Using the disk manager in Windows, I repartitioned the hard drive (giving Windows about 250G and leaving a 200G unformatted partition. Everything was fine.

I installed Debian linux on the unformatted partition. When it came time to install Grub, I told the linux install to NOT put it in the MBR but to put it on the partition on which linux was installed. (I have done this in the past with a dual boot for XP with no problems.)

When I rebooted the system, I expected the linux partition to be ignored (since it should not yet be in the equivalent of the MBR) and the system to boot up in Windows 7 as normal. (I would then use a live linux cd to snag the boot sector of linux and BCDEdit to set up a dual boot situation.)

However, the system now comes up with a flashing cursor and a blank screen and remains so until I turn it off.

Using the restore disks will wipe out everything. Using a restore point did nothing.

Is there any way to get the partition table restored without wiping the hard disk? And is there not way to get a dual boot with a Windows 7 installation?

Any help would be VERY appreciated. Thanks.

[prjmgk · Accepted solution]

Resolved this myself. I booted using a live cd of Knoppix. From it, I used GParted and made the Windows partition the bootable partition (and the Linux one as not the main bootable).

I then used dd to snag the boot sector from the Linux partition, saving it to a USB thumb drive.

I then rebooted back into Windows and used BCDEdit (?) to modify the boot menu in Windows. Now on a boot, a boot menu comes up with the choices of Windows 7 and Linux (with Windows being the default).

[mpg187]

How come you can't use grub?