Multiboot: OpenELEC & Windows

Even with its various preinstalled operating systems some people like me look out for other systems. On the one hand I like OpenELEC since it boots XBMC very fast and on the other hand I have always been a Windows user after growing up with DOS. So creating a multiboot system with Windows and OpenELEC seems to be the perfect combination for me. Prerequisites You will need a few things to follow this guide: 1. An empty(!) HDD or SSD which is already installed in the Ultra 2. A USB flash drive for the OpenELEC installer (128 MB+), another one for e.g. Hiren's BootCD (1 GB+) 3. Windows installation files on DVD or USB flash drive (4 GB+) Creating the OpenELEC installer We will use vpeter's build as it is preconfigured for the Ultra. Get the latest .tar from the forum: http://forum.xtreamer.net/topic/23596-openelec-downloads-versions-updates/ and extract it somewhere on your computer. There is now also an official Ultra build on the OpenELEC page which you can find here: http://openelec.tv/get-openelec (scroll down). In the extracted folder you will find a create_installstick.bat file (respectively a create_installstick file for Linux systems) to create a bootable USB flash drive which installs OpenELEC on your Ultra's system drive.

Make sure you read the instructions carefully. It will ask you to specify the location of the USB flash drive that you want to use. Doublecheck that you enter the correct location! In my case drive letter i: After a few seconds you should hold the key to your own OpenELEC. Installing OpenELEC Plug the OpenELEC USB flash drive in your Ultra and power it on. It will boot the OpenELEC installer and you can choose the first option to "quick install" OpenELEC. Be aware, this will wipe everything on your HDD or SSD, that's why we chose an empty system drive as prerequisite!

The installer creates two partitions. The first one is a 242 MB sized (EXT4) partition for OpenELEC itself, called "System". The rest of the drive is used for the second partition (EXT4 as well), called "Storage". Here, OpenELEC will store profiles and other data. The installation should finish after a few seconds. Remove the USB flash drive and reboot your Ultra. It should boot right into XBMC! Now it's time to shrink the second partition to make room for Windows! We will use PartedMagic from Hiren's BootCD to do this. Getting a Partition Manager I recommend Hiren's BootCD on a USB flash drive because it's something like the Swiss army knife for your computer and everyone should have it. Follow the guide and create yourself a Swiss army!

Alternatively you can boot Ultra OS that came with the Ultra and install GParted via the "Synaptic Package Manager" under "System > Administration". Start the package manager and enter "gparted" into the Quick search box. It will list the results while typing. Now rightclick "gparted" and mark it for installation. Then just click the "Apply" button above and GParted will be installed. But again, I highly recommend Hiren's BootCD, not only because Ultra OS from the USB drive is so bloody slow. But also because it includes PartedMagic, a very comfortable Partition Manager based on Gparted. Re-Partition the system drive for Windows Let's assume you have Hiren's BootCD. Boot the Ultra with it and choose "Linux based rescue environment > Start". If you prefer other languages than English, scroll up/down before hitting "Start" to select the language closest to yours.

When PartedMagic finished booting, it will show a simple desktop with some icons. Start the "Partition Editor".

Obviously, people use system drives with different sizes, so it does not necessarily have to look exactly like the image on the left. But still, you have to consider a reasonable partition layout. In my case it's a 32 GB model and i will shrink the OpenELEC "Storage" partition down to 4 GB and will install Windows on a 16 GB partition. The rest will serve Windows as well as drive D: for Firefox/Thunderbird profiles etc. If you want the same, read on :) rightclick the second partition, which is called "Storage" and select "Resize/Move". Shrink the Storage partition to 4 GB (4096) and "apply" the operation. Now after a while, there is unallocated drive space. Rightclick this and choose "New". Create a 16 GB (16384) sized partition with NTFS as file system and name it "Windows".

If you have space left, make another NTFS partition and name it e.g. "Data". When you're done it should look similar to this. The reason why I don't use Windows to partition the system drive is because Windows creates an additional small 100 MB partition for some system files but I think if you're not using features like Bitlocker, this is just a waste, even if it's just 100 MB!

Installing Windows Now you should have your Windows installation files at hand. I recommend installing Windows from a USB flash drive, as this is a lot faster than from a DVD drive. If you don't know how to create a bootable USB flash drive with Windows setup files, I recommend reading this or this. Install Windows on the 16 GB partition that you have just created. Make OpenELEC boot instead of Windows When Windows finished with the installation you will notice that the Ultra now boots into Windows instead of OpenELEC, this is because the Windows partition has been marked as the boot partition and the MBR (master boot record) has been overwritten. To revert this we will use PartedMagic again. Reboot the Xtreamer Ultra with Hiren's BootCD and select PartedMagic.

As you can see in the "Partition Editor" the third partition is now the boot partition. To change this back to the first partition, rightclick the first partition and select "Manage Flags" from the context menu. Check the "boot" flag as shown here. You will also need to restore the MBR to the previous state. This can be done with PartedMagic too (or a terminal/SSH client like Putty). Start the Terminal application (monitor icon with black screen) and you get to the system console. Alternatively use Putty to connect to PartedMagic via SSH. The username is "root", the password is "partedmagic". Type the following to download the mbr.bin and write it to the MBR section:
cd /tmp wget http://files.mavvy.net/xtreamer/mbr.bin dd if=/tmp/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda

If your terminal session looks like this, then everything went fine and you're ready to boot OpenELEC again. Let's do this! Unplug the Hiren's BootCD and restart the Ultra. If OpenELEC boots into XBMC then we are almost done! The only thing left to do is to activate the bootmenu. Activate the bootmenu We can stay in XBMC to do this, since OpenELEC's SSH demon is enabled by default. Use Putty to login to OpenELEC via SSH. The username is "root" and the password is "openelec". First of all we need to remount /flash with read/write permissions to replace the extlinux.conf file.
mount -o remount,rw /flash cd /flash wget http://files.mavvy.net/xtreamer/menu.c32 wget http://files.mavvy.net/xtreamer/chain.c32 rm extlinux.conf wget http://files.mavvy.net/xtreamer/extlinux.conf

Finished! If you shutdown OpenELEC now and reboot, you should get the bootmenu to select either OpenELEC or Windows. Some final remarks, tips & credits extlinux is a simple but useful bootloader and does its job very well in my opinion. If you want to read more about its options, check out the wiki entry at tinycorelinux.net for instance. You can also use a JPG or PNG as background image in the bootmenu, it's described in the tinycorelinux wiki. To save a few seconds when booting OpenELEC you can disable the OpenELEC splash. To do so, remove "vga=792" from extlinux.conf. If you want to boot OpenELEC directly and show a boot prompt only when SHIFT or ALT is pressed during boot, edit extlinux.conf like below. When booting, you get a prompt saying "boot:" where you can enter "windows" to boot into Windows. And if you want Windows to boot directly, then change the first line to "DEFAULT windows" and enter "linux" in the boot prompt to boot OpenELEC. Easy enough?

DEFAULT linux LABEL linux MENU LABEL ^OpenELEC KERNEL /KERNEL APPEND boot=LABEL=System disk=LABEL=Storage vga=792 quiet i8042.noaux LABEL windows MENU LABEL ^Windows 7 KERNEL chain.c32 APPEND hd0 3

I hope this guide will help you to get a better user experience with your Xtreamer Ultra. The following thread in the official OpenELEC forum helped me alot to get this guide done: [HOWTO] Multiboot OpenElec + Windows without Ubuntu install - the thread also describes how to map the two EXT4 partitions in Windows to drive letters. That way you can easily modify XBMC's profiles folder etc. Thanks alot for that great post!