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I have two hard disks, one SATA and another IDE.

I have windows XP and 7 on the SATA one, and Ubuntu on the IDE. Both of them boot and work, the bios recognizes them.

After I installed Windows 7, and connected the IDE drive, it freezes on "Starting Windows" (the black screen with the Windows logo). I unplug the IDE drive, and it starts normally.

Windows XP starts normally on both situations (with or without the IDE one connected), same for Ubuntu (it works with both disks connected or just the IDE where it is).

The IDE drive is on good status according to SMART.

The IDE is first on boot order. It goes to the Ubuntu's grub first, then by default it goes to the Windows 7 bootloader, and then to XP. I think the problem is not about the bootloader or grub.

I just read that it can be solved formatting the "problematic" hard disk because Windows 7 cannot handle so many active partitions or something like that. But that's not an option for me, I don't want to lose my Ubuntu nor have it unbootable.

I connected both disks, booted from the SATA disk directly instead of the IDE one first, and Windows 7 boots well. It worked but I can't figure out why.

I can live with it but I will have to choose booting from the SATA one directly if I want to use Windows 7, for some reason it won't work passing through Ubuntu's grub first.

How can I solve this without this consequences I mentioned?

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  • duplicate: superuser.com/questions/41595/… its probably the bootloader
    – Logman
    Oct 20, 2013 at 0:04
  • it's not duplicate. The guy doesn't have an option to perform installation order mentioned in your link. He need some help with what he have at the moment, and this is all three OSs already installed
    – Nikola Dimitrijevic
    Oct 20, 2013 at 0:09
  • the information he needs is in the link/post... more than likely. He has to edit the windows boot.ini or grub
    – Logman
    Oct 20, 2013 at 1:02
  • Can you explain how that post or some answer on it is related to this please? He is worried about one bootloader seeing another, my Ubuntu's grub loads first, then by default go to Windows 7, then by default to XP. The bootloaders are ok I guess. Also I think the problem shouldn't be there, because I can make Windows 7 "starts booting", it just freezes on "Starting Windows", the black screen with the logo.
    – kenshin9786
    Oct 20, 2013 at 1:30
  • If the IDE that contains ubuntu is missing, windows 7 starts fine. This means that there is NOTHING wrong with the Win7 nor the XP installations. The Operating systems are 100% good. THe problem lies with the way the computer is booting up and how the partitions are laid out.
    – Logman
    Oct 20, 2013 at 2:36

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