SteveRiley, what was the name of that kick-butt dual boot utility?

[Tom_ZeCat]

Remember back when we had to do a ton of trouble shooting to get my Lenovo laptop to properly dual boot with Kubuntu and Win 7? It was a beast, thanks to a strange Lenovo design, but we finally got it working. Some time later, you posted about a tool you found that assists with setting up a dual boot, something that you said was outstanding. What was that?

I've decided to set up my newly purchased Asus netbook as a dual boot with Kubuntu and Windows 7 Starter. I can't see running VirtualBox on a computer with only 2 GB of RAM, but I should be able to dual boot this little PC.

[Qqmike]

any of these ... ? -->

GUI packages to help you change/repair your GRUB 2 setup/options:

GRUB2 Editor
A KDE Control Module for configuring the GRUB2 bootloader
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kcm-grub2/

Boot-Repair
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

Boot-Info (gives you a diagnostic report on your system)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Info

kde-config-grub2

Grub Customizer
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...3#post10340183

--by Not_S-R :-)

[Snowhog]

The rEFInd Boot Manager is what you might be thinking of.

[SteveRiley]

The rEFInd Boot Manager is what you might be thinking of.

Yep. It's so much easier to configure and manage multi-boot with rEFInd. But you do need to a UEFI machine, and you need to boot it in UEFI (not BIOS compatibility) mode.

[Tom_ZeCat]

I'm very surprised, but it looks like I won't be needing that tool after all. On this little netbook, I simply installed Windows Starter first, then Kubuntu and then Grub sorted everything out automatically. The Grub menu was there immediately after I booted up. That's a far cry from my experience with my Lenovo laptop. With it I installed Windows 7 first, then Kubuntu, and then there was no Grub menu. Only Kubuntu came up even though I could see the Windows partition on the hard drive. Reinstalling Grub didn't work either. I had to do a ton of research on the Internet to find out all the squirly things Lenovo does to the EFI and what the workarounds were. That tool could have helped me had I known about it back then.

It's not needed for this Asus netbook, but I've saved it in case I ever need it. I'm really surprised.

[SteveRiley]

Perhaps that netbook has only BIOS rather than UEFI? rEFInd is only for UEFI. For BIOS machines, you actually do need something like GRUB to boot Linux and to manage multi-boot properly. Furthermore, Windows Starter is 32-bit only, not 64-bit; the 32-bit versions of Windows don't support UEFI. So even if you have UEFI on that thing, booting Windows Starter will switch on the BIOS compatibility module. In this state, GRUB will think the machine is BIOS, not UEFI. GRUB's BIOS support is much more mature than its UEFI support.