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So originally I had installed Windows 7. Then a couple of weeks ago I installed Debian. I now wanted to try Ubuntu so I installed it without taking to much care for the booting process, I let Ubuntu figure that out. In the installation process, Ubuntu detected Debian succesfully, but did not mention to have found Windows. I thought that was not ideal, but I went on with it, and now I can't boot windows. I know there are some questions here and posts on Ubuntu.org to recover Windows booting, but I think my situation may be special, I'm trying to use 3 operating systems, people normally use one Windows (the one preinstalled on the computer) and one linux distro. I don't know how to configure bios to do that.

Can you point me to some help for my particular situation? How to install even more distros?

I know how to do these things: Using basic Gparted or other "Disks" (a Ubuntu and Debian native application) to reduce, create partitions, and basic things about formats like ext4 vs fat32. But I don't know how to use mbr or grub I don't understand very well how they work, how they have to be alerted of operating systems on the computer.

EDIT a 3 days after problem: Suddenly today I turned on the computer and it offered more options for booting, the same grub2, but now there is Windows 7 to choose (and it worked) and also Memtest86. So, my guess is, it fixed itself, because of the restarting and updating (Ubuntu downloaded two times software by itself, the first time 180 MB, the second less). So no idea, but is now fixed. Thanks for the suggestions, I had no time for implementing them!

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  • uninstall grub. install rEFInd. problem solved.
    – mikeserv
    Dec 25, 2015 at 22:46
  • Can you give me one (short, I don't want to bother you) reason why Grub is not appropiate? Is just bad experience, or the other is just more advanced? Dec 25, 2015 at 23:13
  • it's not short - but i'm not bothered. if you like yourself, you'll drop grub. the distros only still use it because they already have the thousands of lines of awful shell script built up around it - but it became fairly well obsolete years ago. look here if you're interested. but really, rEFInd is easy, and you very likely don't need any bootloader at all - Windows can load itself and Linux can load itself. rEFInd will just provide you a menu for selecting which one should when you boot.
    – mikeserv
    Dec 25, 2015 at 23:19
  • Ok thanks. I will take sometime to decide... im very ignorant and i could destroy everything, thanks. Dec 25, 2015 at 23:26
  • well, if it matters, you should just be able to do sudo apt-get install refind (or maybe it's called refind-efi) in ubuntu. im pretty sure there's a package. anyway, the rodsbooks.com site linked to in that link is really useful - and it's written in a way a regular guy might understand.
    – mikeserv
    Dec 25, 2015 at 23:27

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