Problem partitioning dual-boot

[Toomas Tamm]

On Tue, 2011-10-04 at 11:01 -0500, John G. Heim wrote:
> Before we go any further on this problem, I should ask if anybody else is 
> creating dual-boot systems with Windows 7 and FAI? 

I have done some, but I never was able to get grub2 to boot both Linux
and Windows. I used the EasyBCD tool under Windows and booted via the
Windows bootloader instead.

More recently, we have switched to an entirely different approach of
installing Windows 7 onto a Virtualbox VM, running under Debian.

All the Windows7 systems that I have seen (both manufacturer-installed
as well as fresh installs on virtual disks under VirtualBox) have a
small hidden partition at the beginning of the disk (sda1). There are
many web pages about the purpose of this partition, I have found 
http://www.mydigitallife.info/how-to-avoid-200mb-hidden-system-partition-from-been-created-during-windows-7-installation/
a rather good overview. Apparently this partition uses a strange
(non-standard) number of blocks by default. Is it possible that this
somehow confuses setup-storage in your configuration?

Another idea: looking at your disk configurations (previous posts), it
seems that you are trying to preserve only sda1 and you say nothing
about sda2 in your disk config file. Yet sda2 is still present after the
install, with Debian installed into logical partitions. Perhaps you
should try to preserve sda2 as well?

Toomas Tamm