creating partition /biosboot for fedora 22

Question

I've installed fedora 22. I've created a partition /biosboot for this. After restarting I found fedora 22 and other two linux distro ( ubuntu and linux mint) but windows 7 disappear. How I get windows 7 along with linux?

Answer 1

First, a BIOS Boot Partition is not mounted and so is not referred to as "/biosboot" -- the leading slash normally indicates a mounted partition or a directory in the root (/) filesystem. This may seem pedantic, but the point is to highlight that I'm making an assumption that you're talking about a true BIOS Boot Partition and not simply some random partition that you've mounted at /biosboot. If you've done the latter, all bets are off and the below may not apply....

A BIOS Boot Partition is meaningful only on GUID Partition Table (GPT) disks and is useful only when booting in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode. If you're booting Windows from a GPT disk, though, Windows must necessarily be booting in EFI/UEFI mode -- that's a Windows limitation. Thus, your question implies that you've installed Fedora in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode but have an existing Windows installation in EFI/UEFI mode. (Your Mint and Ubuntu installations were probably also in EFI mode, but they can switch pretty easily and so would still boot in BIOS mode after you installed a BIOS-mode GRUB.) There is one possible flaw in this analysis: You didn't specify how many disks your computer has. If you've got two disks, you might be booting Windows in BIOS mode from an MBR disk and Fedora in BIOS mode from a GPT disk. If this is the case, the below doesn't apply; but if you've got a single disk, or if all your disks use GPT, read on....

The first thing to do is to disable BIOS/CSM/legacy support in your firmware. How to do this varies from one computer to another. On a few systems, it can't really be controlled by the user, in which case you'll need to poke around to figure out how to force the computer to boot in EFI/UEFI mode. Knowing the brand and model of your computer (or motherboard, if it's self-built) may be helpful.

Once you disable BIOS/CSM/legacy mode, the computer should boot using whatever boot loader you'd used before. Chances are you'll then be able to boot Windows, Mint, and Ubuntu, but not Fedora. You can boot into whatever OS controls GRUB (presumably Mint or Ubuntu) and do a sudo update-grub to get it to detect Fedora.

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EDIT: Based on your Boot Info Script output, you appear to have an EFI-mode installation of Windows and a BIOS-mode installation of Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora. There's no evidence of an EFI-mode boot loader for Linux, which you must have to boot all your OSes. Here's how to recover:

1. Disable BIOS/CSM/legacy support in your firmware. Using this feature is what got you into the problem in the first place, and disabling it will help you control your boot process in the future. The next step requires booting your computer in EFI mode, which you can do most reliably by disabling the CSM. I can't provide detailed instructions on how to do this because the details vary from one computer to another. The options appear in the firmware's setup utility (what most people erroneously call the "BIOS setup utility"), so you'll have to dig through there. Chances are you manually enabled the CSM, since most modern computers ship with it disabled. (If your computer predates Windows 8, though, it may have shipped with the CSM enabled.) Note that "enabling BIOS/CSM/legacy support" is sometimes phrased as "disabling EFI/UEFI booting," although this latter phrasing is rare.
2. Install an EFI boot loader for Linux. Several are available, but the two that are likely to be easiest to install are:
   • My rEFInd -- You can do a test using the USB flash drive or CD-R image, available on the rEFInd downloads page. It should show you options for Windows and for both Ubuntu and Mint, although they may be hard to tell apart initially. Also, your Fedora install seems to put the kernel inside an LVM, so you'll need to split off a separate /boot partition to get it to work, or at least copy your Fedora kernels to the ESP or some other accessible location. (You can tackle that later.) If rEFInd works from a removable media, install its Debian package or PPA from Ubuntu or Mint, then tackle fine-tuning it: Create a /boot partition for Fedora and give the Ubuntu and Mint partitions names of "Ubuntu" and "LinuxMint," respectively, so that rEFInd will show the correct icons.
   • GRUB and Boot Repair -- The Boot Repair tool can automatically fix many GRUB problems; however to work in your case it must be run from EFI mode. Also, it's an automated script that might or might not get everything right in your complex quadruple-boot configuration, and there's no way to know whether it will do the right thing except by setting it loose on your system, so there's a risk that it will make things worse. If it works, though, everything will come together immediately.

As a side note, I'd say that it's probably better to use virtualization (VirtualBox, QEMU, VMware, etc.) rather than try to boot so many OSes on "bare metal." Multi-boot setups like yours are complex and difficult to maintain, whereas virtualization enables you to isolate each OS in its own container, thus making things much simpler to manage.