Hello, recently I’ve destroyed a laptop and salvaged its SSD. I have put together a caddy and an enclosure for it to be useful for my new laptop.
My laptop is Lenovo T420 with modulus DVD/Caddy spot.
I wish to install Windows 7 Pro 64bit on my salvaged SSD.
I with to set things up such that:
1.When I press the power button, I boot to OpenSUSE 13.2 KDE 64bit as currently, uninterrupted
2.If I interrupt the BOOT, and choose to boot from the secondary SSD, it boots me to Windows7Pro, without further interruption.
OpenSUSE OS is unaware of the Windows7 SSD
Windows7 OS is unaware of OpenSUSE OS.
A small portion of the secondary SSD will be partitioned to possibly FAT32 as a data transfer between the two OS(I’d also like suggestion for format type).
This is somewhat of a dual-boot, but I wish to MAKE SURE that my Primary SSD, and OS is unaffected by this process. My current ideas are:
Take out Primary SSD.
Insert Secondary SSD.
Install windows7 Pro, as usual, do my customizations and etc. then also leave a data partition which can be shared between the two computers, possibly in FAT32 format.
Take out Secondary SSD, and mount it on a caddy.
Insert Primary SSD to its rightful place.
Take out DVD-RW drive (caddy is meant for this spot).
Insert the caddy with secondary SSD.
Here’s a question, would this method EVER interrupt my boot without me initiating it using “thinkvantage” button?
If this is successful, I will be doing the same with other unused 2.5" HDD, the caddies are only $8, so I wish to have a dedicated Archlinux drive and Linux Mint 17.1 drive also.
Any pointers/suggestions?
In openSUSE yast boot be sure that the box scan for foreign OS is not checked. So if an update changes something in grub then it won’t look to find other OS’s
Say, what format should my data share portion be? Also, is it possible to accomplish this without removing Primary SSD in the first place?
Any thoughts on how to create the data partition during installations?
I think your biggest issues is where will windows write it’s boot code, I would go in bios and set your 2nd ssd as #1 during windows install just to make sure windows doesn’t hijack mbr and then set them back.
About opensuse’s grub2 if it detects windows you can always remove it from yast.
If you’re using uefi ignore the above as I haven’t played with efi installs and have 0 practical knowledge about them.
About data sharing openSUSE has read/write support for ntfs you don’t need the extra partition, and about windows reading suse’s data, I’d say use ext4 for your home partition as there are a ton of freeware and a few OSS tools that have read support for ext4, I haven’t seen any that support btrfs or xfs.
So far:
Unsuccessful, after 5 hours of installing Windows 7 Pro into the SSD, computer fails to boot from it as soon as I change where it is plugged in.
I think I am going to re-try installing things to it once it is in place of the Caddy. Also, of course, the freaking Windows broke itself after an update.
It’s a great relief that I take swap out the SSD, and everything is the way it should be.
That may be difficult. Windows does not see Linux file systems because none are supported by default. There are Windows programs that you can load that can read some Linux file system. But Linux does see Windows file system it is built in. You can not mount the partition at start and you can keep a regular users from mounting it but you can’t stop root from mounting it and reading it or what ever.
To do what you seem to want you would need to recompile the kernel without the Windows file system code. Not a trivial task
You can’t not recognize attached hardware. Even Windows will it just ignores non-Windows file system
Be careful. Now Windows 7 persistently begs to upgrade to Windows 10 and the upgrade is in normal upgrades unless you refuse it. Windows 10 will seek and will overwrite the first hard disc MBR!
A dual boot system (worked for some years on windows 7; 2 hard drives inside laptop not a USB second drive). Main 1st hard drive is Windows in BIOS or it does not do routine upgrades (Disc C in windows nomenclature), OpenSUSE 12.xx to 13.2 on second hard drive set up with SUSE as FIRST OS to work in GRUB was completely trashed by the windows 10 upgrade. And on any subsequent upgrade of windows 10 it does the same again.
I have not yet worked out how to solve the problem of there-write of MBR on any Windows 10 upgrade.
I now keep the Linux DVD in DVD tray, to reset GRUB after a windows upgrade, but not best way
If using legacy booting then the MBR could be set to generic and the grub installed to the boot partition and a boot flag set. Since Windows MBR code is generic it should survive upgrades but you may need to reset the boot flag both for the upgrade and then back after.
I have been dealing with W7 begging for W10 upgrade for some time now.
I have been looking for ways to disable the begging on google, except the registry key that is recommended to be modified doesn’t exist on either of my two w7 computers.
On 2015-09-02 05:16, gogalthorp wrote:
>
> That may be difficult. Windows does not see Linux file systems because
> none are supported by default. There are Windows programs that you can
> load that can read some Linux file system. But Linux does see Windows
> file system it is built in. You can not mount the partition at start and
> you can keep a regular users from mounting it but you can’t stop root
> from mounting it and reading it or what ever.
Just add an entry in fstab, type “none”.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)
On my wife and my desktop PCs (that have a legacy MBR and not a UEFI) we have always left MS-Windows (7 / 8.0 / 8.1) on the MBR and have instead booted Linux by setting the active partition to the GNU/Linux partition where Grub/Grub2 is located.
In that case, I wonder what does window-10 do ? Can windows-10 even install if the MS-Windows partition is not the active partition ? Does windows-10 change the active partition to point to the Windows-10 partition ? If the later, then surely it is a simple matter to set the active partition back (in BIOS) to point to the Linux partition that has Grub/Grub2 ?
