Hi folks,

Starting with the question, loading up my new SATA hard-drive's Vista loads up my old SATA hard-drive's grub...

And with some more details:
I recently bought a new 500GBs SATA hard-drive as I was running out of space. My old hard-drive (also SATA) had Vista on it, and Ubuntu. I had installed grub on its MBR and managed to dual-boot wonderfuly.
When I installed my new hard-drive, I had Vista installed on it. Loading it up worked great - my old GRUB didn't show at all. A few days later I reinstalled my Ubuntu (on the old hard-drive), and another grub on the new hard-drive.

Configuring the new grub to load vista up properly was easy as ever. I booted up and the new grub shows up. To sum it up, I have the following hard-drives:

• hd0 - Has my new Windows Vista and a fresh new grub copy.
• hd1 - Has some data-packed partitions, no OSs.
• hd2 - Has my ols Windows Vista, Ubuntu and my old grub.

• My new grub has no problems what so ever loading up my new ubuntu (on hd2)
• Loading up the new Vista (on hd0) gives my the first DOS-like screen, and before it moves on to the second DOS-like screen (and the third graphic loading screen), it goes STRAIGHT to my old grub's stage2 boot menu (installed on hd2).
• Further attempts to load hd0's Vista from my old grub just loads my old grub's stage2 boot menu.
• Loading up hd2's Vista finally loads my hd0's new Vista.

hd0's Vista somehow finds and runs my old grub. However, it doesn't go through the good-old "Loading GRUB stage 1.5" and "Loading GRUB..." - It goes STRAIGHT to the boot-menu.
How can I fix this? I dread formatting my old Windows Vista as it might break my new Vista's rotten-but-working bootup-process

Thanks,
John.

What do you mean by "dos-like" screen, do you mean the boot menu where you pick the which Vista or a memory test?
So after the vista's third graphic loading screen(the one with the windows logo), it goes into the grub stage boot?
How do you load up hd2's vista? Maybe what you think is hd2 is really hd0?


You need to go into /boot/grub/menu.lst and check that it's really booting into what you want it to.

To change the vista boot options, you need to use bcdedit, a gui is available here...
http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

In "dos-like" screens, I mean the 2 automated command line scripts that follow the "Booting GLDR" line...
Here are the steps I do which lead me to the second grub:

• Start the computer, get past BIOS,
• Reach the stage 1 grub screen ("Loading stage 1.5" and then "Loading GRUB"),
• Get to choose which OS to book into: Ubuntu (which works great) and Vista.
• Select Vista (on hd0). I see the "Booting GLDR screen" (automated dos-like).
• Instead of going to the next automated dos-like screen, the PC jumps straight to the old GRUB (don't even get the "Loading stage 1.5" screen - straight to boot menu). Selecting Ubuntu on this old grub gives me an "Error 17" screen (or something like that)
• Choosing Vista on hd0 keeps getting me to the same place.
• Changing to load Vista on hd2 loads my new Vista correctly.

I can't load my old Vista at all...

Thanks,
John

If you can boot into the new vista, get the vista boot editor in the link I posted and add something in your new vista's boot menu to boot up into the old vista, maybe vista reads the boot information from the first disk no matter what disk you boot into.

I have xp/vista/ubuntu on one machine and this is the way I managed to get xp to boot up. I first select vista from grub and then boot xp from vista's boot menu.

Thing is, I don't really need the old Vista.

As far as I'm concerned, I might as well delete it and install Gentoo instead of it (So that I'll have Vista on hd0 and Gentoo+Ubuntu on hd2.

The question is, will deleting my old Vista also prevent me from booting my new Vista as well?

I think it would help to get a clearer picture of your setup related to booting, so how about downloading the Boot Info Script to your desktop, and then do the following as root user, but replace <username> with your username:
That will create a "RESULTS.txt" file in the same directory from where the script is run, namely your desktop; please copy/paste the contents of that file to your next post. That will help clarify your setup.

Hello again,

I fixed the problem!

Turns out there was a copy of my old menu.lst on my C:\, which I put there for backup (so I can copy the grub configuration I wanted).
I didn't delete the file, and somehow Vista's boot loader read the menu.lst and acted on it. Once I renamed it to something else (ie. text.txt), I managed to load normally on my own!

Thanks a lot for your help,
John.