On Sat, Jul 25 2015, Mick wrote: > On Saturday 25 Jul 2015 16:32:19 Daniel Frey wrote: > >> Is Windows writing a hybrid partition table? Maybe use something like >> parted to check. >> >> Dan > > MSwindows these days installs a separate boot partition. The MSWindows boot > manager can be chainloaded from there, but then it needs to be able to read > the (GPT) partition table of the main OS, which in this case seems to be > having trouble with. However, I am thinking that the URL I posted may refer > to the bootloader (as in the MBR boot code) having trouble booting from a GPT > table, rather than the MSWindows boot manager itself .... hmmm ... this needs > some testing. > > Allan, have you tried first creating the partitions and FAT32/NTFS > filesystems, BEFORE you attempted to install MSWindows?
Thank you and daniel for your help. The system came with windows 7 on the whole disk 500GB. To shrink it to 50 takes work as there are "unmovable" files in the middle (the "" are there since you must actually moved them). Anyway I didn't try but simply removed the big partition (I left the "dell" partition and the windows recovery partition). I then installed linux (an error) leaving a partition for windows. Linux installed cleanly (after applying canek's two-step procedure for profile setting). With my laptop I got a windows 8.1 recovery/installation flash drive. I installed 8.1 (trivial) and then the trouble began. 8.1 is a *very* different interface. I couldn't even find logout. Also the version sent is buggy. I don't remember how I eventually exited. After that the system wouldn't boot from the hard drive even after I re-executed grub2-install and fdisk (both from the arch linux flash drive). I then belatedly remembered that I should install windows first so that linux is the last one to set the boot loader. Windows (8.1) installed trivially but worked very poorly. I called dell, and they had me install windows updates and network drivers. Then windows worked. But the interface is still foreign. I am now reinstalling gentoo from the arch-linux flash. allan PS reinstalling linux is very much faster that doing it the first time; the handbook seems much better than it seemed last week. I only install once every three years when I buy a new machine and have forgotten everything.
