Ubuntu & Vista....Help!

Pacifico

Hi,

Right i need some help here if possible!

I'm having a problem dual booting a machine here. I firstly installed Vista RC1 (Nice btw ) then installed Ubuntu 6.06 on a 30GB partition. So in total there are 3 partitions on the drive. A 512MB SWAP, 30GB Ubuntu and 40 or GB's Vista partition. Swap is at HD0, Vista at HD2 and Ubuntu at HD1.

The PC boots fine into Ubuntu, but it gives me no option to boot into Windows....? I've tried loading GRUB by pressing ESC at startup but only the Ubuntu installs are listed.

Any ideas?! I'm a Linux noob
Cheers.

aidan_walsh

You'll have to get the details of where the Windows installations are and edit your /boot/grub.conf file to add them.

Pacifico

I see....

And how would i go about doing that?!

I did a bit of googleing, and tried (in grub):

Find/boot/grub/stage1
root(hd0,2)

Although, it said unknown command for the root bit.....

feylya

I'd say you'd actually need to reverse the ways you installed Windows and Ubuntu so Ubuntu is first. Vista has some weird new bootloader thing which Grub mightn't be able to see/find.

ethernet

feylya wrote:

I'd say you'd actually need to reverse the ways you installed Windows and Ubuntu so Ubuntu is first. Vista has some weird new bootloader thing which Grub mightn't be able to see/find.

That's the problem -- GRUB is not seeing Vista.

I was running Vista RC2. Decided to set up a dual-boot with SLED as I did before. I let it install GRUB. I even manually added the Windows partition to the list [chainloader]. Didn't boot, I can tell you. Got up at half eight this morning to reinstall Vista. Only took about two hours. Luckily I backed up documents just beforehand.

Just remember, for example, (hd3,4) means the fifth partition of the fourth hard drive, i.e. counting starts at zero. I'm not sure what your resolution and colour depth are. If you tell me, I'll tell you what to substitute "vga=0x314" for. Try this config in your /etc/grub.conf file [it may not work, but if it helps to save you from going through what I did then it's worth it!]:

default 0
timeout 10 \\ this gives you ten seconds to make your choice

title Ubuntu
  kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/[*your root Linux partition, e.g. hd1*] vga=0x314

title Ubuntu Failsafe
  kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/[*your root Linux partition, e.g. hd1*] ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off vga=normal noresume barrier=off nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 3

title Windows
  root (hd0,2)
  chainloader +1

wayne040576

Your problem may be that Vista needs to be installed in the first partition of the first hard drive. Otherwise you may run into problems. You can use grub to trick windows into thinking it is on the primary drive with a few extra entries in the grub menu.lst file. For example I had similar issues with XP because it was installed on the second partition of my secondary drive. I tricked its boot loader into thinking it was on the primary drive using the grub map commands. Give it a go. It may take a bit of trial and error to get the right combination of commands. A hint with using grub. You can hit the esc key on the menu to enter the basic menu. From here you can actually edit the lines on the menu. This stops you having to boot back into linux to edit the file each time you get a fail on windows. But remember, anything you edit there is only temporary so keep a note of you chages so you can edit the file with the correct settings. Read the help that is available in the grub menu for a list of things you can do with it.

title Windows NT/2000/XP (loader)
root (hd1,0)
savedefault
map (hd0) (hd1) --This is where grub reverses the order of the
map (hd1) (hd0) -- disks before it passes the info to windows
chainloader +1

ethernet

I stumbled upon this as well. It may be of help to you: http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/about78184-0-asc-0.html&sid=0166f15817a229c00b87ee08e9ecf472