New
#1
Dual boot Windows 10 and Android-x86
Hello!
Excuse me if this is the wrong section, please move to the appropriate section. My colleague has an old netbook and would like to either install Android-x86 on it or dual-boot with Windows. As I am a bit more advanced, I decided to try it myself so I can help him step-by-step.
The first attempt was to install Android-x86 only in a USB Flash drive. So I removed my test-notebook's hard disk (to avoid any accidents) and proceeded with the installation. I won't go into details as this is not the purpose of this post. After some attempts I did it right and could boot into Android-x86.
Then I wanted to go a step further and dual-boot with Windows. My Colleague is going to use Windows 7, but I had already installed Windows 10 Pro 32-bit on my test-notebook and wouldn't want to format and install 7. Besides, how different it could be using Windows 10? So I loaded Computer Management, then Disk Manager and shrank the Windows partition by about 10GB to make room for the Android-x86 installation. To identify the space easily within Android-x86 Setup, I even created a new simple volume and formatted it as FAT32 and labeled it Android. Within Android-x86 installation there were no partition names, only sizes in KB, but I managed to identify the correct partition and install Android there. When asked I also installed the Grub boot loader to be able to boot into Android and added an entry for Windows. After reboot I expected to boot into Grub and see selections about Andoid-x86 and Windows. But instead I booted into Windows 10! So I thought to use EasyBCD to add a boot entry for Android. Using the Metro interface made no difference and the computer booted into Windows 10 again without giving me any choice. I then loaded EasyBCD again and this time I disabled the Metro interface, so I had the old good Windows 7 (legacy) boot loader. I could see the entry for Android but I could not boot into that. I tried to add a boot entry with Grub (legacy) connected to the Android partition without any success. Then I tried all other available partitions, naturally nothing again. Once I tried to add a Grub2 entry but all I got was an empty list without boot entries, so I saw a Grub command prompt. I know nothing of Grub, so I cannot use this command prompt to boot into Android-x86.
Is anyone familiar with Grub and EasyBCD to tell me what to do? If that helps, in Windows Disk Manager I see 4 partitions and Android is installed in the third partition which is formatted as ext4. In Android Setup I see more partitions (weird) and the Android partition is sda5. Android-x86 was 6.0 RC1 Marshmallow, but I don't think that matters.
Thank you in advance...