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I have a Windows partition with safeboot (not my choice, of course)
I've managed to dual boot Linux on it (lots of juggling the MBR around to be able to install grub)
I have, of course, all the keys and passwords used to access my safebooted data via the usual ways.
I can boot into grub, select the safeboot MBR image, unlock it, and back on grub select Linux instead of Windows... if that does help in any way to access the data...
my disk layout is
- sda1, boot (grub), NTFS, safeboot
- sda2, extended partition table
- sda5 ext3 (with a dump of the safeboot image on sda1 before grub)
- sda6 swap
Do I have any hope of easily accessing the partition under Linux?
this extends on, but I can't even upvote there with no reputation yet. How to mount Safeboot encrypted Windows partiton in Ubuntu
I doubt this is possible. I'm interested in this myself... could you share how you successfully dual booted? I'm trying to do this at this very moment and think my solution will be to have sda1=safebooted win 7, sda2=linux, sda3=truecrypt. Then I'll keep data on sda3 and access with both linux/win 7. So far I don't know how to get dual boot setup, though. Could you assist or point to your method (if it's on the web somewhere)? – Hendy – 2011-04-15T18:53:54.873
@Hendy, make a copy of your safeboot mbr using dd. then point install linux on another partition and let it overwrite the safeboot mbr with it's own. then simply create a new grub entry pointing to the file you saved with the old safeboot.mbr – gcb – 2011-04-18T10:00:57.077
@gcb: thanks -- I ended up using EasyBCD which added an entry for Linux, which loaded the grub bootloader I installed to a partition (not MBR). For your method, I'm guessing I would do
dd if=/dev/sda of=safeboot.mbr bs=512 count=1
, but where do I put that file? In the /boot/grub folder? And what does the grub entry look like, exactly?chainloader +1
and then some reference to safeboot.mbr? Thanks! – Hendy – 2011-04-19T19:34:53.650@Hendy save on any partition grub can read, and "chainloader (hd0,5)/safeboot.mbr" you will boot that one, authenticate and get back to grub (it's your MBR) from there you select the regular windows chainloader +1 – gcb – 2011-04-19T21:45:19.043
@gcb: quite interesting. I had no idea it worked like that. Not sure if it matters, but my installation of SafeBoot does not require authentication at boot. I don't know how they configure it, but it appears encrypted when trying to fiddle with it via fdisk or gparted or the like, but never asks for a password at BIOS/boot time. I boot straight and uninterruptedly to my Windows logon. Perhaps they configure it to use a keyfile of some sort? If I don't have to authenticate in the first place, would I be able to "authenticate and get back to grub" as you suggest? – Hendy – 2011-04-20T05:17:59.933
@Hendy are you sure you have safeboot? may be only compression or something? anyway, if it's safeboot, whatever code your BIOS run from the MBR can be run from grub from a image file of the original MBR. – gcb – 2011-10-31T22:30:41.513