Launching Zorin over Windows 7

thegreatdegeorgio

I've been struggling, making incremental advances on this for two weeks, so my memory may not be 100%, but here goes...

Put Zorin on a USB stick, booted into the Live environment, then installed into the unallocated partition on the disk (around 450 MB available).

Following the advice from a video, i set up a 30MB partition, ext 4 journo, mount point , then a 4MB swap area at the End, and the rest was a :/home, Ext4 journo.

I hit install and got a warning that there needed to be another partition for a backup BIOS, or something to that effect. So i took my best guess and but a 4MB partition, i think at the beginning of the whole group with the BIOS use selected, after which the OS install seemed to go OK.

So back to Windows, download BCD 2.2, left GRUB 2 as the default NeoSmart, put GRUB legacy to boot on the 30GB partition, checked the box for default OS, moved it above Windows, hit Add Entry, and restart the computer.

Are you with me so far?

So now i get a screen that allows me to choose Zorin or Windows, and with trembling hands i choose Zorin... and get a screen saying that Windows could not boot. Well duh!

So i can still boot Windows with no problem, and i can get Zorin off the Live USB just fine, and when i check the disk partitions there ane no unallocated spaces, but several blue-framed, healthy partitions, and there's less available space on the hard drive, so i suspect that Zorin probably did install correctly, but why is Windows being a bully? Did i do something wrong with that fourth BIOS partition at Install, or choose the wrong partition from BCD, or is there something else that i'm completely unaware of?

I'm grateful for any advice, but i'm the dumbest guy i know, so you'll probably have to talk to me like i'm 5 years old!

Thanks gang!

Limdi

YOu can have your hdd partitions as mbr or as gpt.

Having an mbr table means you put the bootlader at that.
If you have a gpt-formatted hdd you put the bootlader (4096KB block) on an unformatted bios partition while the partition needs to be of the bios type.

Both possibilities are for your computer to find what to actually boot, he has to decide of all the partitions there are.

However I presume you have the bootloader in the mbr(master boot record). So you choose a backup bios? Never heard of that before. However, did ever arise the sentence "Device for boot loader installation"? Here would Zorin ask "tell me where I can implant my bootloader", wether u have mbr or gpt, you would say /dev/sd(your hdd), not any partition.

Of what i've read grub2 is used at zorin, so it would do no harm to install the bootlader on the hdd, maybe replacing the windows one.

It would do no harm, cause grub2 is friendly towards other operating systems, it searches for them, it lets u choose, when grub2 is called at boot.

I do not know why bsd did not work, why it was not able to change the windows bootloader to make it call zorin, i've never tried that before.