GRUB - How to add Windows to boot menu?
 

Hi there,

I'm sure people have asked this before, but I haven't found any answers as of yet on this. My computer has two harddrives, C and D. Windows is installed to D drive, and SuSE is installed on C drive. During SuSE 9.1 install, the option was offered to do my own partitioning, so I chose to utilize the whole C drive for Linux.

Once I chose this, the configuration for BOOT changed to allow only Linux, Floppy and Safe. (makes sense) Prior to my changing Linux's own partition choice, the selections for BOOT were Linux, Windows, Floppy and Safe.

It seems like it would be fairly simple to just edit GRUB's conf file and add Windows to boot from the D drive, but once I got the conf file opened, I could not figure out exactly what it was I needed to type in for the instructions for GRUB to be able to add the Windows option on the selection menu.

Does anyone have any idea how I might be able to edit GRUB to be able to include my Windows OS. Not that I want to, mind you, but I'm a windows network admin and I am sorta stuck with running Windows for that part of my job, and for someone who wants to go all Linux, it's misery...anyway... :-/

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

GG

Hi!

Add those lines at the end of the grub.conf:

title=Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,5)
makeactive
chainloader +1


I'm not sure what you said about C and D. Are those different partitions or different harddrives?. Linux uses /dev/hda1,2,3,4,etc for the first HD and /dev/hdb1,2,3,4,etc for a second HD, where the numbers are the partitions.

The above line "rootnoverify (hd0,5)" assumes that Windows is at /dev/hda6.

Good luck and don't forget to make backups ;)

Hi Megaman X :-)

Thank you for your response - I'll work on that conf file using what you posted. And yes, I have two separate harddives. Windows lives on the second harddrive, so should be hdb1, but I'll know more after I give this a try. Linux needed and deserved its own harddrive, IMHO it is a much more worthy tenant on my system than Windows, the arrogant neighbor. LOL... Thanks again, and yes, I'll back it all up beforehand...No sense taking chances, eh?

Thank you again...

GG

Good luck geekgyrrrl mate ;).

Well, just a quick tip. If your Windows is on the second harddrive and on the first partition, I think the line rootnoverify should be:

rootnoverify (hd1,0)

Windows usually don't like being on the second harddrive, so be ready for surprises. I'm not saying it won't work, but we never know. I never installed Windows on the second HD myself :).

Regards!

In which case you'll need;