I have a gateway M-7315u which came with Vista Home Premium, which worked fine until I loaded Fedora 11 on the system. Now, whenever I boot, and chose the menu by "F10",I can either choose one of 3 Fedora Operating Systems, or "Other". However when I select "Other" it starts to load Vista, then gets to a screen that asks how I wish to recover the computer, or exit. The only choice here is "exit", as the other line of "recover from factory default" is greyed out. I had purchased the 3 recovery disks, and tried to load them; which incidentally did allow me chose the "recover from factory default", which I did load. However, selecting "Other" now just repeats the cycle again of asking how I wish to recover the computer. I suspect it may have something to do with "grub", but being a newbie there is something I am missing. Fedora 11 works fine, but I also want to use Vista. Oh, yes, I am willing to reformat the hard drive, but would like to save my AOL emails if possible before I take that step. Any help would be appreciated, and yes I have looked over the present threads relating to this area. I quick response would be appreciated, and thank you. donacarl at donac20129@aol.com

Sounds like Vista is broked :S

It sounds like a problem with Vista, so you'd probably be best going to a win-doze forum somewhere and asking them. (Cos this is a Linux forum )

~Callum

I guess the problem here would be this : The option OTHER in the grub does not point to the Vista Boot Loader. So when you choose OTHER option, it gets lost and hence this problem.

Could you please post the output of fdisk and also youe grub.conf file (or the grub configuration file in Fedora 11 - I am not sure if its the same /etc/grub.conf .)

I would concur with abi0909's suggestion that you post the fdisk output, if you haven't done this before, just open a terminal and log in as root then type fdisk -l (lower case Letter L) and post this partition information here to get help. I would expect based on your post, that your grub.conf or menu.lst entry for vista is pointing to your recovery partition on the drive.

On ubuntu, menu.list (grub config file) is in

/boot/grub/menu.lst

if you cant find it in fedora

James

Device Boot Start End Blocks ID System

/dev/sda1 1 1306 10485760 27 Unknown
/dev/sda2 * 1306 15854 116864748 7 hpfs/ntfs
Partition 2 does not end on cyclinder boundary
/dev/sda3 15854 16297 3557376 7 hpfs/ntfs
/dev/sda4 16298 30401 113290380 5 extended
/dev/sda5 16298 16323 204800 83 linux
/dev/sda6 16323 30401 1133085439+ 8e linux lum


disk /dev/dm-1: 5200mb, 55200936960 bytes
255 heads, 63sectors/tracks 632 cylinders

units=cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

disk ID: 0x00000000

disk/dev/dm-1 Does not contain a valid partition table

And your menu.lst file from the /boot/grub directory as requested????

From the looks of your fdisk output, your windows entry in menu.lst should be:

rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

It would appear to me that grub is trying to boot from a recovery partition. Please post your grub.conf or menu.lst.

Sorry, please excuse my ignorance, but I could not open either the menu.1st or the grub.conf file. When I go the folders of either of these two files, they are 'X' out, and give me a message of not being a known type of file. Am I doing something wrong, or are they just corrupt. I will have to do more reading on Linux I guess. Thanks for your help, but if you could point me in the correct direction it would help.

donacarl

Log in to a terminal/konsole as root, type su or su - and enter your root password. Then type: cat /boot/grub/menu.lst, if no output type: cat /boot/grub/grub.conf. I'm not sure which file Fedora uses as I don't use Fedora. Post this output here minus the lines beginning with a hash mark (#) at the top.

AFter a bit more reading I was able to edit the above mentioned menu.1st file changing the rootnoverify (hd0,0) to (hd0,1). The problem initially was how to become the owner of this file (using chown command in the terminal mode), as it was owned by "root", and thus would not allow me to change any of the properties to edit the file. Well, I learned a bit and thanks to yancek, abi0909, and bratmon who pointed me in the correct direction that the menu.1st file was not pointing to the correct hard drive petition to run Vista. Thanks Guys.

LMAO sorry but I just love your sig lol

James

Do you mean you changed its permissions to your user? (So you now own it, not root)

If yes, its not a good thing to do.

su -

and then

gedit /etc/boot/grub.conf

or

gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

will work.

Simply copy and paste from gedit (GUI text editor) and stick it on here if need be

Sounds like you fixed it though so anyway

Just a heads up

James