Solved Dual Boot Question

Hey guys,

I currently am dual-booting with Win7 and Ubuntu. If I download Win8 CP, and install it over the Ubuntu partition, will it still boot? Or will I need to reinstall Win7?

Hopefully this makes sense

Thanks

I'm not sure but i think you cannot overright GRUB with WCP loader, only if GRUB could incorporate the new boot string

Are you dual booting on a single drive or across two drives? Here I unplugged the host drive with 7 and saw a clean install of the W8 CPreview go right onto the second drive used for testing.

Once the 7 host drive was replugged I used EasyBCD to add a new 7 entry into the W8 BCD store with instant results. When booting into 7 following resetting the 7 drive as the default boot drive again and adding the new W8 entry in W8 failed to load! the winloader.exe was immediately seen until trying out the new repair tools on the 8 dvd!

The automatic repair saw results and can boot either 7 or 8 CP from either of the two drives. With your situation if on one drive you can opt to nuke ubuntu to see 8 go the second partition made into an NTFS primary or if you are using a second drive for ubuntu shrink and split that drive to allow the 8 instal as long as you can use the ubuntu root partition as the mount point for Grub since the 8 mbr entries will replace any for the distro.

Thanks for the help guys, but I think I'd rather experiment with it in a VM.

Have fun trying that! It WON'T happen! That was already looked into here for VM Player 4.0 and the Oracle VirtualBox and the results were simply a NO GO!

The only way to run the CP is a direct install to a drive since MS has beefed up the security as well. You can no longer install without first entering a product key which is then verfied online by the installer before the installation will proceed. Unlike the 7 betas and RCs a few years ago MS security is a factor in not allowing a VM to work.