Dual booting Windows 7 and Linux

Traditionally, if I have the time, I nuke all those little insignificant partitions that come on a HP/Dell/Acer/etc with Windows pre-installed when I partition up the hard drive for installation.

Pro-Tip: Don’t delete the first tiny partition if it’s a Windows 7 machine. It’s important, and stuff.

Luckily, I didn’t delete it … but when I tried to launch Windows 7 by selecting the huge ntfs partition in Grub, I got a Windows boot error about a required partition that was missing. You instead have to boot off the small partition.