Installing Windows 7 on my Linux box

April 28, 2011 in linux, windows

For reasons that I’ll go into in another post, I’ve decided to make use of my MSDNAA licences and install Windows 7 and Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 on my primary desktop machine, called ‘enterprise’ (as in Star Trek, rather than ‘enterprisy’ software). Hopefully this can be done without causing too much of a fuss with my partitions and bootloader.

The current setup is thus:
The first disk is 500GB (465.76 logical) and has 3 partitions, a 100GB Windows XP partition (to be replaced), followed by a 2GB swap partition and the rest (370GB or so) is taken up by my Ubuntu root partition, no separate /home. Then there are 3 400GB drives in RAID0 using mdadm, that logical volume has one big ext4 partition (Barclay).

The plan is simply to erase the XP partition and install Windows 7 in its place, then update grub from a live CD. In the future I may end up shrinking the Ubuntu partition (since all the big stuff lives in Barclay), move the swap across, and grow the Windows 7 partition… apparently GParted can do that these days.

This all sounds fairly straightforward, hopefully the Windows installer doesn’t decide to do something dumb, like install onto one of the 400G drives it doesn’t recognise as being formatted without giving me a chance to tell it where to install. The trickiest part will be running updage-grub. Jayen has suggested that it would be a BadIdea^TM to just run the update-grub found on a live CD as I usually do, and should really run the one installed on my Linux system, since differences between versions could cause problems. Assuming my first HDD is sda, and the root partition is sda3, this should be a matter of firing up the live CD and running:


$ sudo su -
$ mount /dev/sda3 /mnt
$ mount -B /dev /mnt/dev
$ mount -B /proc /mnt/proc
$ mount -B /sys /mnt/sys
$ chroot /mnt
$ update-grub
$ grub-install /dev/sda
$ exit


I’ll update this post with how it all goes!

Update:
Everything went roughly as planned, except for one minor hitch. I was feeling paranoid about my RAID array, and I don’t have enough SATA cables for the CD drive as well as 4 hard drives, so I unplugged the RAID drives before the install. After doing the update-grub and plugging everything back in, the RAID array wouldn’t assemble! Turns out I swapped 2 of the SATA cables (and mdadm is that finnicky?).

Only other unexpected thing was the Windows installer making 2 partitions instead of one, so I needed to mount /dev/sda4 rather than /dev/sda3. Apparently the extra partition is a Windows equivalent of /boot.

I’m already getting annoyed at using Windows and associated tools:

• There’s no PDF reader built in. How am I supposed to read… anything?! Is Adobe paying them to leave this out?
• Seriously need package management. Why I have to follow a 3-step process to install a sequence of updates to the Windows Phone dev tools is beyond me. Also, I now have a dozen useless .exe’s sitting in my Downloads directory (perhaps if I downloaded to /tmp…).
• To do Windows Phone development, even if you’ve already installed the full-blown ‘Ultimate’ edition of VS2010, you have to go back and install the ‘Express’ version.
• Highlight-copy/middleclick-paste is definitely the coolest feature of X. Anyone know how I can make Windows Shell do this?

On the plus side, useful codecs are installed by default in WMP, and Daemon Tools is easier to use than ‘mount -o loop’.

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