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Ok. Long story follows. I'm a Windows dude, but have started playing around a bit with Ubuntu. I had Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 installed on my notebook until a couple of days ago. Ubuntu's GRUB was the boot loader, and it took care of the whole dual boot thing in a nice way, allowing me to switch back and forth between the two OSes.
Then a couple of days ago I decided to flip another hard drive into my machine, use software Raid-1 on one of my existing partitions and use the remaining space of the new drive for new data partitions. In order to use software mirroring I had to convert the boot hard drive to a dynamic disk in disk manager. When I did that, disk manager popped up a "file not found" error dialog with no other details, and also assigned drive letters to the two Ubuntu partitions that had previously been without drive-letters in Windows. I unmounted the Ubuntu paritions again, waited for the mirrored partitions to sync up, checked that everything looked ok, and rebooted. Boom.
Next, after booting, grub would load and then immediately reboot the system. So apparently something along the way (I'm guessing converting from basic to dynamic disks wasn't grub/Ubuntu compatible in some way) screwed up the MBR and/or grub. So I used the Windows 7 DVD to just "bootsect /nt60 sys" it back to a plain Windows machine. (didn't dare trying the same with Ubuntu as I'm a Windows dude and not very familiar with the Linux world... :) )
Now that everything is back to normal I am thinking about doing a clean install of Ubuntu on some unpartitioned space, and get back to the dual-boot Windows 7+Ubuntu setup that I had before. Both hard drives in my machine (a notebook) are dynamic disks, and there is unfortunately no space for a third hard drive. Is it safe to install Ubuntu on a Windows 7 'dynamic disk', or will I risk screwing up something for Windows?
Thx. This is a notebook so hardware raid is unfortunately not an option. – KristoferA – 2010-02-01T05:59:18.180