Grub won't boot windows after it has been moved
 

Yesterday I decided to physically move my windows partition to a different part of the drive. To do this i had to image that partition, then delete it, recreate it in a different spot and then restore the data to the partition.

The clever bit (i thought) was that the partition was in a physically different spot, but it was still called the same thing as it was before--> /dev/sda1. However now when i try to boot into windows from grub i get the error message:

root (hd0,0)
filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7


Here is the output of cat /proc/partitions

major minor #blocks name

8 0 58605120 sda
8 1 16755795 sda1
8 2 1 sda2
8 3 27607702 sda3
8 5 6658942 sda5
8 6 6658911 sda6
8 7 923643 sda7

and the grub entry for windows:

title Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

any ideas why i might be getting this error message in grub???

Post the output of 'fdisk -l' (without quotes) and the content of /etc/fstab. Someone here should be able to tell you what edit to make in your /boot/grub/menu.lst.

fdisk -l gives

Disk /dev/sda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x9c899c89

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1774 3859 16755795 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 1 1773 14241591 5 Extended
/dev/sda3 3860 7296 27607702+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda5 116 944 6658942+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 945 1773 6658911 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 1 115 923643 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table entries are not in disk order

and my /etc/fstab is


# /etc/fstab: static file system information
#
# <file system> <dir> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
none /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0

/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 ro,user,noauto,unhide 0 0
/dev/dvd /mnt/dvd udf ro,user,noauto,unhide 0 0
/dev/sda7 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda5 / ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/sda3 /media/sda3 vfat user,uid=1000,gid=1000,defaults 0 0
/dev/sda6 /media/sda7 ext3 user,defaults 0 0
/dev/sda1 /media/sda1 ntfs-3g user,uid=1000,gid=1000,defaults,locale=en_AU.utf8 0 0

Try "rootnoverify (hd0,0)" instead of "root (hd0,0)".

well using rootnoverify (hd0,0) did get rid of the error message described earlier, however now when i try to boot windows grub just stops after printing:

Booting 'Microsoft Windows XP Professional'...

roonoverify (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

on the screen

to me this says that grub is working fine, rather it is when grub passes the control over to the windows bootloader that things start breaking

so this thread has fast become a 'windows question thread' but i shall ask my question anyway: is there a way to restore the windows bootloader from out side of windows....???

no worries, I think i have worked it out. All i need to do boot up using the windows xp cd and go to the recovery console or something and tyoe fixmbr. This will either do one of two things..

either it will install the windows boot loader at the beginning of the windows partition, in which case the chainloader +1 line in the grub menu.lst file should pass control to this and it should work straight up

or

less desirably is that it completely wipes my mbr of my drive and (erasing grub) and shoves the windows boot loader there, in which case i shall have to reinstall grub from a live cd....no worries.....but i'm not sure if this will fix the lack of bootloader at the beginning of the /dev/sda1 (windows) partition

anyways either way it shall have to wait as i'm going on holidays for a week without my computer

thanks for the help!!

Try fixboot first - he's the guy to fix up (partition) boot sector records. If that doesn't help, then try fixmbr.