This final video in the series will show you how to apply your boot manager to your master boot record. The master boot record is the first thing your hard drive opens when you restart your computer – when you store the boot manager into the MBR you are overwriting the old MBR. This is only a security risk if you haven’t followed the necessary steps to ensure that your boot manager has been successfully configured to start up both of your operating systems. The curve ball in this episode is that you have to have an “official” license to true hide your other partitions, but the truth is you can always either leave your floppy disk in to true hide them OR you can live with the other partitions not being true hid. The software only runs around 18 dollars anyways.
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Craig received his degree in Informatics with a cognate in Business from Indiana University: South Bend in 2008. Craig lives with his wife and daughter in South Bend, Indiana near Notre Dame. Craig is currently employed by Precision Electric, Inc. and acts as the chief Information Technology Manager. With a passion for teaching and technology, he founded The PCMichiana Tech Help Show in Fall 2009. His focus is teaching users of all backgrounds how to learn technology while having fun.
Great series – thanks! As a technophobe and fearful of heart, I followed along as best I could but I don’t have a 3.5″ floppy so I used 3 different programs to burn an image of the MBR, but it still didn’t boot off the DVD. Undaunted, I plunged ahead and eventually just edited MBR to the hard drive. It worked. I had XP, Windows 7 and a shared partition. And it booted properly! Yayyy! Then I tried to install Ubuntu over the XP. Ooops! Now I have 5 partitions (on a very small 80 gig drive). A hidden primary with XP of 28.79, a shared logical of 1.92, a logical(?) of 19.41 with Ubuntu, a logical(?) of 1.99(swap?) and a system primary of 22.43 with Windows 7. I’m thinking of using Easeus in Windows 7 to format partition 1 and make it logical and then merge partitions 1 & 2 as a shared logical. Would that work? Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks! Rick
well i am Jamaica and i have been watching your dual boot tutorials i don’t have a floppy drive and the CD option doesn’t work and i did follow exactly what you said..