Defunct WinXP in Ubuntu boot menu after upgrading from a dual-boot
 

Hey everyone,

I'm a new Linux user and also new to these forums. I started out with WinXP and two partitions, C and D. WinXP was installed on C. Needing Linux to run some computational software I decided to install Ubuntu 9.10. It had an install-within-Windows option so I did that and decided to dump it onto the D drive. A couple of days later (yesterday) I decided to upgrade from WinXP to Win7 while still keeping Ubuntu. After backing everything up and installing Win7 on top of WinXP, I noticed that Ubuntu was still intact - good news!

The boot menu was a little weird though. There were initially 3 options:

Previous Version of Windows
Windows 7
Ubuntu

Selecting Windows 7 boots Win7, great. Selecting either of the other two options brings me to the Linux boot menu (GNU Grub v1.97~beta4), where I get to select some version of Ubuntu in regular mode or recovery mode... and then an extra option at the bottom:

Microsoft Windows XP Professional (on /dev/sda1)

Selecting this option brings up an error: unknown command 'drivemap'.

I like having everything nice and clean so I set out to fix these problems. I first removed the "Previous Version of Windows" using a tool called EasyBCD in Win7, but that program does not detect anything Linux. So now I would like to remove the extraneous "Microsoft Windows XP Professional" selection item in grub. Well, either that, or update it to a bootable version of Win7, which I guess is fine also. I probably have to edit some file in Ubuntu, right? Following advice on some other thread, I checked /boot/grub/menu.lst but the file doesn't exist. Can anybody offer some advice?

Thanks so much in advance, and merry belated Christmas to all!

Oh, a clarification. Ubuntu itself starts up and works perfectly fine. I just wanted to fix an annoyance in the boot menu, is all. Thanks!

Uh oh ... I hear alarm bells ...It certainly does - one of its primary uses (for me at least).Indeed - that advice was for the previous version of grub. You are using grub2 with Karmic - see this for some (good) background.

Thanks so much for your response. The link was very helpful. update-grub was the key command I was missing. The problem has been solved now.

Thanks again!

I think you are getting the WinXP entry in your boot menu probably because it is still there in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. But its strange that you say the menu.lst file is not there. Without that, I dont know how you are getting that boot menu :scratch:

You can try this: Boot up your computer in Ubuntu and then open a terminal window and type:

You can replace 'vi' with the editor you are comfortable with. Scroll all the way down and you should see the entry for WinXP and Win7. Comment out or remove the WinXP portion. This will get rid of the WinXP option from the boot menu.