Hi everyone, I have a multi boot setup with Mavericks, Win8, Ubuntu, OpenSuse and Fedora or rather I did! I use Chameleon as my boot loader and the first problem I had was the Windows 8.1 would not update Windows 8 until I changed my active partition to the Windows 8 partition and let it boot from there and not from Chameleon. Next problem, the windows 8.1 update wiped the 3 Linux partitions on my extended partition, just leaving my swop partition untouched. I am not happy to say the least Any views on this? Mike
In this multi-boot setup; is this one drive with a bunch of partitions? The way I multi-boot, I use multiple HDD's and install the OS on a clean and separate HDD, then use the F12 key for boot selection for what OS I want to use. The key is making sure that all the other HDD's are unplugged when installing another OS, this is to keep the boot loader for that OS on that one HDD. Then just repeat for each additional OS install.
Sorry the OP lost so much hard work. I never seem to have much luck getting past dual booting. It is great the OP got as far as they did. If they get back to that point again, I hope they find a method to backup/restore the boot loader. (And any stomped on partitions). Like the first reply, I maintain one OS per drive. But every once in a while, I get the itch to just have two 4TB drives in a raid 1 configuration and install multiple OS's. But battling boot loaders would probably do me in.
I didn't mention I have two other drives with some more on lol, I have got it back to booting OSX and Win 8.1 and I rarely use Linux nowadays so it could be worse. Mike
I used 7 and Ubuntu. I did read about 8's bootloader not playing nice with the other OS installs, but when I upgraded from 7 to 8 (and subsequently 8.1) it gave me no trouble, surprisingly. On a lighter tone, this would probably be because 7 told 8 to be a good boy But seriously speaking, the upgrade allowed me to keep everything running, with 8's bootloader (the fancy one with the blue GUI) functioning smoothly. A clean install, however, forced me to install Ubuntu over 8 (I'm no good at fixing bootloader-related issues; I just curse stuff and reinstall ) , causing my bootloader to go to GRUB (which isn't that bad either) but yes, the bootloaders don't like each other when not "properly introduced".
I do not know how people manage to multi boot but my experience has not been so good. In fact, I seek advice on this: Important thing is to note multiple hard disks in my system and I do not multi-boot. Let us say on day 1 I have win 7 and decide to clean install 8 and remove 7. On Day 2, I decide to go back to 7. Now going down the OS often gives chkdsk errors on some disks for some time. On a clean install, This has happened for me from 8 to 7 and from 8.1 to 8. However, on a clean install If I go up say from 7 to 8 and say from 8 to 8.1, the chkdsk problem is not there. The hard way for me so far has been this: 1. Go down versions 2. Delete all volumes/disks and rebuild all data (backed up on external storage). Pt 2 is laborious and often takes 8-10 hrs of copying and pasting. Any suggestions. The chkdsk is not killing but going down often creates chkdsk at least once on all the partitions. Once I get MS to do it, the problem goes away. Should I just ignore chkdsk as a minor irritant or does it point to something else.