How to recover Linux After Installing Windows (Linux-Windows Dual Boot) :: The easiest way

Have you experienced the problem with booting your computer with dual copy of Linux and Windows? This is a common problem in a Windows-Linux dual boot PC. If somehow you need to re-install your Windows version, then the Linux partition disappeared. You can bring your Linux back easily. Just follow this article.

May be you had two operating systems installed in your PC, one Linux and the other is

Windows and somehow you need to reinstall your Windows copy. After reinstalling Windows, the previous GRUB is rewritten and now your Linux system is not shown in your boot menu. Well I have also faced this problem and tried to get rid of the same and searched the net for a solution. Most likely you are not interested in formatting your Linux system and reinstalling it, because that will erase all your necessary documents and files from the Linux partition. So what to do? You want both Windows and your Linux on the same computer and you want your previous Linux installation back into work. Here I will show you some tips to get your Linux operating system back along with Windows.

If you search on the web how to recover Linux after installing Windows, most of the techies will tell you to start doing it in the terminal way writing commands in the terminal. But of course there is easier way to do this. If you are not so technically sound or do not want to remember the long commands that you need to type, then go ahead, I’m going to tell you the easiest way to get back to your Linux installation.

I’m using Ubuntu Linux and will describe the recovery process considering Ubuntu OS, but this should work on most of the Linux flavors. Here we go.

1.       Get a copy of Boot Repair CD. To download the ISO image, click here.

2.       Burn the ISO image into a CD or make your USB flash drive bootable with this ISO. To make a flash/pen drive bootable, you need to burn the ISO into it with softwares like Linux Live USB Creator (Get it from Here) or Universal USB Installer (Get it from Here). If you need help getting your flash drive bootable, please check this Hub: How to use your flash drive to try Linux without installing or install Linux from USB flash drive.

3.       Now boot with the Boot repair CD or your flash drive selecting appropriate boot device.

4.       After booting into your new OS, you will see Boot repair running. Select Recommended Recovery option. After successful recovery, reboot your computer and there you will see the list of operating systems you previously had, in the boot menu.

  There is another option to recover Linux system if you don’t want to try the above described option. This is how you will do this:

First you need to have a live copy of your Linux CD. If you do not have one, then download one from the web and burn it to a CD. Alternatively, you can make a live flash drive or pen drive using the live CD. To make flash drive bootable, see above description.

After getting the Linux distribution and equipped with your live version of it, you are ready to go. Boot into Linux using your live CD or flash drive. Then install Boot Repair typing the following commands to the terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install boot-repair

or type this:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair && sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair

after getting installed, click on recommended recovery option and it will recover your previous boot options. Reboot your computer and see in your own.