Dual-Booting McAfee Endpoint Encryption - Linux Kernel Upgrade

I used the package manager to upgrade the kernel to 3.0.0-15-generic in my laptop, yesterday evening and when I tried to boot into Windows this morning, I couldn't: there was no Windows entry in the Grub Boot Menu.

After a bit of cursing, when I finally calmed down, I realized what had happened. When a new kernel is installed, a new grub configuration file (grub.cfg) file will be generated and this is based, I think, on the output of os-prober, but, and this is crucial, because my Windows installation is encrypted, the installation is not detected and thus missed off the new grub configuration file.

In order to rectify this, I had to manually edit the grub configuration file (/boot/grub/grub.cfg) and add, following the last menuentry entry, this entry:

menuentry "Windows" {
        set root='(hd0,1)'
        chainloader +1
}

If your Windows installation is in another partition, then you'll need to modify the second line, e.g. set root='(hd1,1)' for the first partition of your second hard drive.

Do be careful when modifying /boot/grub/grub.cfg as you could end up when a non booting system and bear in mind that if you run update-grub2, this file will be overwritten, with whatever grub detects.

Dual-Booting McAfee Endpoint Encryption

I've just spent the best part of two days getting my laptop back up and running. I foolishly installed Kubuntu 11.10, which overwrote the MBR and then I could not boot to Windows, which is what I use at work and because the Windows partition was encrypted there was little I could do to get back in.

After a bit of time wasting with the help desk, I decided to bite the bullet and reinstall everything to get back my dual-boot setup, hoping that I had backed up everything of importance.

In essence the process is fairly simple:

1. Install Windows
2. Install Kubuntu (Linux)
3. Ensure that you can boot to both OSs
4. Install McAfee Endpoint Encryption

Once all that is done, I get the Endpoint Encryption logon prompt, before the Grub menu, so that I can now boot to either Windows or Kubuntu.

We use McAfee Endpoint Encryption 5.2 so I don't know whether this will work for other versions.

Today I found this post which provides a good tip on how to back up the MBR, using the trusted DD command in Linux ( and a different (better?) way of doing the dual boot dance with McAfee EE):

dd if=/dev/sda of=/your_usb_drive/safeboot.mbr bs=512 count=1

If only I've read this before I started.

Note to restore MBR copy safeboot.mbr to /boot from Linux and then you'll need to add an entry to the grub menu, see this how-to for instructions.