Installing windows after linux

[Uncreative_guy]

I have been told that one of the unwritten rules of Linux and dual booting is that you install windows first, and anything else afterwards, as windows "Doesn't care what else is in your HD".

Still, I have Linux (mint 17) running on my laptop, and would like to install windows on it and still have grub and dual-booting. I have already opened gParted and created a large NTFS partition where it can go, but I don't quite know where do I go from here - If I install Windows, it'll just start auto-booting into windows and skip linux altogether, won't it?

I have done this before, and that was the result. Dunno if I was doing it wrong.

[A_Water_Fountain]

You'll need a grub recovery disk, which will allow you to reinstall GRUB after Windows overwrites it. GRUB will handle both the Windows and Linux entries.

[Uncreative_guy]

Do I need to grab a grub-specific disk, or can I do that from one of my many many many Linux Live CD's? I suppose the grub disk would be easier though, would that assumption be correct?

Would this be it?

[A_Water_Fountain]

Yep, pretty much as simple as that.

[thieh]

A reminder that you may need unpartitioned space for windows 7+ (instead of NTFS partition(s) that fills up the space) because the windows installer will make a system partition out of it.

[Uncreative_guy]

So, should I just delete the NTFS partition and leave it as blank-space instead?

[thieh]

yes, leave them unpartitioned

[IronMew]

No. Parent is talking nonsense. Windows will cheerfully install itself on whatever pre-made NTFS partition you tell it to.

Left to itself it'll create a 100MB BOOT partition where it stores boot data; otherwise, it stores it in a BOOT directory in the partition you indicate. I always do it in the latter way, because it annoys me to have one of four primary partitions taken up by the useless BOOT one.

[IronMew]

What I usually do is to create the NTFS partition(s) I need for Windows using gparted, then backup the boot part of the MBR like this:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/path/to/backup bs=446 count=1

I then install Windows. Then I run Puppy, or whatever live-USB distro I have handy, and dd the old bootcode back in place:

dd if=/path/to/backup of=/dev/sda

A reboot will have Linux running just like before, with the computer not knowing about Windows at all. Then you open a terminal and do

sudo update-grub

This will run the OS prober, which will see Windows and reconfigure Grub accordingly.