Installation of Grub2 on Extended Partition To Leave MBR for Dual-Booting Windows
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"If Grub2 is installed to the Extended partition will it start all the three operating systems?"
As answered before in post #2, NO. In your situation with what is called a Legacy/msdos drive you need Grub or some other bootloader code in the MBR. If you had an EFI machine, you would not but you don't so that's irrelevant. As I mentioned earlier, you could put windows code in the MBR and boot your Linux from it but if you are a 'lay' user, I wouldn't bother as it is a convoluted multi-step process. There are other Linux bootloaders besides Grub which you can use but whatever you use, you will need some code in the MBR.
You can't boot any OS's on a Legacy/msdos drive unless you have some bootloader code in the MBR If you have some bootloader code in the MBR pointing to Grub on a logical partition, then the Grub on the logical partition can boot as many other OS's as you configure correctly, but I doubt that is what you want
Thanks for your reply. I have understood what is required to be done.I have downloaded the new BIOS from Dell support website and shall be updating once windows 7 is reinstalled.
*I have also backed up my '/home' on an external drive. I shall be re-partitioning the HDD and install windows first and then Leap-15.2 with Gnome Desktop.
Shall come back after it is done.
For what it's worth, I think that VirtualBox is the way to go, instead of "dual booting." Put the guest operating system in a virtual machine. VirtualBox is absolutely free, and supported by Oracle Corporation – probably the largest software company in the world.
Whatever boot loader is in mbr whether it be grub, lilo, windows, something else, is what will be used to boot the system. You will have to use the bootloader in the mbr to chainload the grub on the extended partition, then yes you can use the grub on the extended partition to boot other installs
Last edited by colorpurple21859; 04-29-2021 at 08:30 PM.
I upgraded Windows 7 to Windows 10 directly from Microsoft Website. It is functioning well. I installed Leap 15.2 also in dual boot with Windows 10. Windows 10, during installation, created a small ntfs partition for its own purpose after its C:\ drive and after that it left 1 MB space between the next primary ext4 partition on which I installed Leap 15.2 with Grub2 bootloader on the MBR. I did not venture into UEFI for want of time; although my Dell laptop does support it.
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