Thank God for Recovery Discs!

[Ken.]

HP dv7-3067nr Entertainment PC
Product Description
# AMD Turion II Dual-Core Mobile Processor M500
# 2.20 GHz
Shortly after Kay gave me this laptop back in December, 2009 I made a set of recovery discs(4) and now, for the second time, they have saved the day!

The first time was in April, 2015 when I tried to dual-boot with Ubuntu and ran out of brain-cells! After trashing the Windows install two or three times and having to use the recovery discs to get back too an operational state each time I finally decided that much more research was needed and the project was put on hold.

Now we move forward in time to 9/19/18 and we find ourselves in the same fix! So, after trashing windows two times I finally found some info that set me on the right path.
How to create a dual boot when preserving Windows seems impossible 
Turns out that Windows 7 only allows for four primary partitions, so if you already have four, your install will not work and if you try force it you will trash your Windows. (... maybe the boot-loader?)

This from the page linked above:

Windows XP, Vista and 7: maximum of four primary partitions has been reached
2. On a computer with Windows XP, Vista and 7 you can sometimes only choose to give the entire hard disk to Mint, in the installer from Linux Mint.

In that case you probably already have the maximum of four primary partitions on the hard disk. Logical partitions have no maximum; primary partitions do. At least in the old fashioned BIOS, because modern Windows 10 computers running on UEFI (provided that the UEFI is in UEFI mode!), don't have this limitation.

The solution is to destroy one of the primary partitions, for example by means of the application GParted on the Mint DVD. This can be a tiny partition, because size doesn't matter: the installer can afterwards retrieve enough space by shrinking another, existing partition. It's simply a matter of reducing the number of the primary partitions.

And, me got lots of help and inspiration from Skhilled! 
Some links that have informed my process:
http://www.docskillz.com/docs/index.php?topic=751.0
https://neosmart.net/wiki/easybcd/dual-boot/linux/ubuntu/
http://www.docskillz.com/docs/index.php?topic=743.0
https://www.ourfamilyforum.org/FamilyForum/index.php?topic=3600.0
Yes, my old laptop is now running Windows 7 and Ubuntu and it all seems to be working OK.

[Skhilled]

Excellent!

[Chen Zhen]

This works fairly well:
http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

The non-commercial version is free.

[Chen Zhen]

One thing I noticed with using EasyBCD is that sometimes Windows updates will change the names of my multiple Windows installations to all have the name of "Windows".
It also changes the order of the OS list at times.
Imo it's something that is possibly overlooked by the Windows devs whereas I should report it.
Their updates should not be editing the names to those multiple OS installations.

I doubt this will affect a Unix installation name (ie. CentOS, Ubuntu, etc.).
I think it only changes the names of Windows installations.

[Skhilled]

I've already told him about EasyBCD. I've used it a few years ago and it worked well but haven't used it since I installed Win 10. Been busy but I really need to get my linux back.

[Ken.]

Tried EasyBCD and it didn't work as expected, maybe because the two OS's were already installed? I may try starting all over again just for the experience and this time installing EasyBCD before installing Ubuntu.