Windows & Ubuntu Boot

[+longgonebn Subscriber²]

I had my 1TB drive formatted in ext4 with Ubuntu 12.04 installed.

I used Gparted and resized the drive, I added 130GB NTFS partition and installed Windows 7 on it.

I now boot directly into windows, no options to select Ubuntu.

What happened? Shouldn't windows or Ubuntu have installed a menu to choose?

How do I fix this?

[Max Norris]

The Windows installer overwrote your old bootloader. Usually a pretty easy thing to repair as long as you have a live CD handy. For example:

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

[+longgonebn Subscriber²]

Oh good, so just get into a live Ubuntu, run boot repair?

Nice and simple, thanks.

[Brandon H Supervisor]

i'd stick with the windows boot loader and use EasyBCD to at Ubuntu to it

(download link at the bottom)

makes things overall easier to work with IMO. especially if you want to get into windows safe mode for whatever reason

[simonlang]

here you see fine that windows really behaves like a virus :)

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

And yet billions of people still use it. Your claim is moot.

[guitmz]

you can use any bootloaders you want... but i do recommend reinstalling grub as the guy said above

[+longgonebn Subscriber²]

Oh I'm staying away from the windows bootloader, never liked it.

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

EasyBCD is very simple to use. I used it in the past.

[+longgonebn Subscriber²]

Now that I have both running I have an issue accessing a drive.

I am using a program called Ext2Fsd to allow me to access my ext4 drives in Windows, works great.

Though, I installed Plex Server and it does not work. I add a folder from those drives, and nothing happens. Ideas?

[Karl L.]

Did you install Plex in Windows or Ubuntu? If its in Windows, its possible that Plex is trying (and failing) to get extended attribute information about the files in the folders you added. Although its just a guess (since I have no experience with Plex specifically), many media servers try to read extended attributes from files. Most of the time this works great. Unfortunately while Ext2Fsd works reasonably well, it is still somewhat incomplete (hence the reason it doesn't support the full EXT3 or EXT4 feature sets), and Windows stores file attributes very differently than Linux, leading to extra work that needs to be done by Ext2Fsd to make extent file systems moutable in Windows.

[articuno1au]

Eloquently put.

[+longgonebn Subscriber²]

Yes installed on Windows (well windows is the one with the issue).

So what exactly are you saying, nothing can be done?

[Karl L.]

Since I'm not very familiar with Plex I'm not going to outright state that nothing can be done, but that is likely the case if my conjecture is correct. If you have a drive (or partition) with only media, it might be a good idea to format it as NTFS as long as you are sharing it with Windows. Linux has much better NTFS support than Windows does EXT2+ support.

[+longgonebn Subscriber²]

Yea they are all ext4 because I had issues getting Plex on Linux to access those drives lol

Now that I am using Windows for some Games, I need temp usage of Plex on Windows, and don't work lol

[Noir Angel]

Windows bootloader doesn't play well with Linux. Install Windows first if you ever do it again

[+longgonebn Subscriber²]

Windows bootloader doesn't play well with Linux. Install Windows first if you ever do it again

Thanks, but that's dealt with now.

[Brandon H Supervisor]

you could try having the drives as exFat

you'll need to install the exfat driver for linux as it isn't installed by default by most distros yet https://code.google.com/p/exfat/

[+longgonebn Subscriber²]

Basically at this point, it's a big hassle to re-format all the drives, have to move around too much data.

So I am either stuck figuring out how to get it to work perfectly with windows, or deal with how it has been.

Thanks guys.