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in trying to dual boot my Win7 with PopOS, heres a walk-through of what ive done

. from win7, partitioned my C drive into a 20gb partition(D) to burn the PopOS iso into and boot from it(used unetbootin tool)

. on boot i cant choose which os to boot to, automatically uses PopOS(from what i gather this is because PopOS doesnt use grub(although you can access the grub commandline)) i can boot into Pop without issues, although i cannot install it since i need to repartition my C drive and i cant do that while its mounted, and i cant unmount it

. so then i tried installing grub but this comes up with another error, when running "grub-install" i get "error:cannot find EFI directory", and indeed there is no /efi directory in my /boot so now im stumped as to what to do about that

here are some boot diagnostics https://pastebin.com/Wu8bqUhK

https://ibb.co/TqcN89m (how my installation wiz looks)

https://ibb.co/Mf8pWSD (how im guesssing it should look)

i dont quite get why it doesnt let me select the sda3 partition to install to, its in the correct format aswell(altho it might be the case that i need an unformatted chunk of space and let the PopOS setup wiz do the formatting for me)

not sure what to try fixing first, grub?, unmounting drive?, something with the partitions boot order? something with /boot/efi?

any help would be greatly appreciated! :D

NickZB
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    Your old Windows 7 is on a MBR(msdos) partitioned drive. Windows requries MBR for BIOS boot. But Pop!OS is based on SystemD boot and uses UEFI. Windows would then need gpt partitioning. UEFI highly recommended gpt anyway. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/610779/pop-os-systemd-boot-cant-detect-windows & Systemd boot loader spec (was gummi boot: https://systemd.io/BOOT_LOADER_SPECIFICATION – oldfred Feb 08 '21 at 21:58
  • so make my MBR into GPT? doing anything to my drive ultimately requires me to format it first(my entire computer), which is the last thing i wanna do(i shouldve done this before installing the OS, evidently). i have been able to format the initial 20gig partition into a gpt one, so now i have to find a way to make it so the Pop boot files are on that partition (they are now in the main C driver, overriding the Windows ones) and i think I'm making progress – NickZB Feb 09 '21 at 01:09

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