Installed Mandriva - lost Win Vista
 

I just installed Mandriva on my machine but sadly Windows did not get added to the grub menu. I am having problems adding it, I think Windows did not get killed but am not sure.

I have googled this without success.

Try to add such lines in your /boot/grub/menu.lst file:

title Windows
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

And don't forget to run /boot/grub/install.sh to make changes have effect.

I did that but rather going into Windows I just get a diagnostics page.

Probably (hd0,1), but let's see the output from "fdisk -l" (might need root/sudo)

I never looked at this before. This script installs GRUB to the MBR---not necessary in this case. All you have to do is edit menu.lst and save it.

As already stated, we need to know what the partition setup is. Also, what partitioning options did you select when installing Mandriva?

Fdisk gives

When I installed I used the default - resize existing partitions - was that a mistake ??? I really hope I do not need to reinstall Windows.

It looks like Windows is on sda2 (hd0,1 in grub-speak)

Thus--in /boot/grub/menu.lst you need:
title Windows
root (hd0,1)
map (hd0,1)(hd0,0)
map (hd0,0)(hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1

That did not work I got unknown filesystem

Take a look at pixellany's entry recommendation. If your last post is what you entered you did not do it correctly, you left out the second map entry. sda2 looks like a pretty small partition though, so try it and if it doesn't work try it for sda3.

Sadly even I cut and paste correctly it still does not work.

I found out that resizing a vista partition can cause vista not to boot up or recognize the partition. Here is a link that shows you what to do after resizing a vista partition. Scroll down until you see this paragraph

Once it's done, quit, remove the live cd and then reboot your computer. Unless you are very lucky, you'll be greeted with this horrible error message saying "Windows Failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause.



Start reading from there and you should get vista back.


http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...sta-partition/

After that is done, follow the above suggestions on adding vista to the grub menu.

Good luck

Thanks for the help.
However after reading lots of advice I now have this in my menu.lst file

Windows - gives file error
windows-0 gives me Windows or Dell Diagnostics which I spent 18 hours running with no benefit
windows -1 gives unrecognised device error.


Is all lost ??? Do I have to install Windows and of course then Linux again ????

PS sadly http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...sta-partition/
did not solve the problem

You have a FAT16 and two NTFS partitions. If booting from sda2 didn't work try sda3, sda3 is over 20 times the size of sda2. Use your first menu.lst entry for windows with the map commands and change the (hd0,1) entries to (hd0,2). Your first partition (hd0,0) is your Dell diagnostics so it has to be sda2 (hd0,1) or sda3 (hd0,2).

Hope it works.

I notice the three windows boot options has hd0,0 which points to the first partition which is a FAT16 i.e dev/sda1.

Your NTFS partitions are on dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3. Partitions are numbered starting at zero. So
/dev/sda2 is refer to as hd0,1 and /dev/sda3 is hd0,2

try this, re-edit and substitute the hd0,0 with hd0,1 and hd0,2 accordingly

title windows-1
rootnoverify(hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot

title windows-2
rootnoverify(hd0,2)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot

Both of these points to the NTFS partitions which vista uses. Test and let us know.

Hey yancek, as I was writing, its looks like you beat me to it. We both have similar answers for him/her. :)

Thanks I will try that tomorrow