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I installed Ubuntu 14.04 to make a dual boot system after a fresh installation of Windows 7 (64-bit, Professional). Windows 7 was installed in UEFI mode on an SSD, after that I shrunk the main partition and booted the Ubuntu boot stick in UEFI as well. Windows at that point worked without any problems.

I was following a guide, but was not aware of the specifics of UEFI, and here is where I believe I went wrong the first time.

While installing Ubuntu I I created a swap space bigger than my RAM on the SSD and a partition for root formatted in ext4. I also created a home partition on an HDD. What the guide I was using at the time did not mention was telling the installer to change the “Device for boot loader installation” to the EFI partition already there. Instead, it remained on /dev/sda.

Installing Ubuntu went off without a hitch, and when I tried to boot there was the list containing Ubuntu and Windows. I then chose Windows, but it would only show a loading bar with "Windows is loading files" and then return to GRUB.

Following additional posts I found, I used boot-repair, which resulted in GRUB showing Windows 3 times, but still not Windows loading. I tried a few things more, but it was hard to find information as most of it seemed to pertain to Legacy mode or Windows 8.

I deleted the partitions, re-formatted the drive again and repeated the process a few times, doing a few things differently, but always returned to the same problem with Windows not booting.

The last time, I installed Ubuntu to the HDD instead, with Windows on the SSD, and Ubuntu again works fine, but Windows won't boot. I ran the Windows repair utilities, ran chkdsk /f, but the only thing that produced any change was the physical memory repair. When I did that, when booting Windows, the Windows 7 welcome screen flashed for a second, but returned to GRUB after that.

Running chkdsk for the first time also showed a few errors on the SSD, but after that it did not show any more. I also ran TestDisk, which showed everything as ok.

At this point I've been at it for two days, and I don't know what to do.

K7AAY
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Arne
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1 Answers1

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Okay, finally got it to work this morning.

This time I installed both to the SSD again, making extra sure to direct Ubuntu to the Windows EFI partition during installation.

The only two things I really did differently this time was formatting the HDD in GPT and running chkdsk three times on both the SSD and HDD, so thank you very much to oldfred for those suggestions.

Worked perfectly.

Arne
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