Lost Vista booting after Fedora 8 install

dpeace · 12-28-2007, 08:59 PM

Hi.

I've been happily running Fedora 7 alongside Vista on my machine, and decided last week to upgrade to Fedora 8. I eventually gave up trying to perform the upgrade, as it persistently hung during the dependency check, despite my removing several packages suggested by several forums.

I then chose to perform a fresh install of Fedora 8, and accepted the default options. Once this had finally finished, I find my machine will only boot into Fedora - this happens without any intervention, and I'm not presented with any sort of OS choice on login. I can mount my Vista NTFS volumes and access the files from within Fedora, so I think that this is a GRUB or loader problem rather than anything more serious.

Before I get out my Vista disc and start trying to fix the MBR, is there any way I can easily correct this situation from within Fedora? I have three hard drives, with the first, second and half of the third given over to NTFS. Fedora inhabits the remaining space on the third HDD.

Thanks for any help,

Darren
Hungerford, UK

reddazz · 12-28-2007, 09:03 PM

Can you check if there is an entry for Windows in your /boot/grub/menu.lst file? On which partition is Windows installed?

dpeace · 12-28-2007, 09:13 PM

Wow! That was fast!

OK, I've looked at my menu.lst, and there is no entry for Windows. There are, however, 2 entries for Fedora (both showing "root (hd2,1)"). Windows is on (I extrapolate, if my Linux is on the third hard drive on the second partition and shows as hd2,1) hd0,0.

Any idea what I should add to my menu.lst?

And thank you very much for your help. Much appreciated.

Darren
Hungerford, UK

reddazz · 12-28-2007, 09:37 PM

Add the entry below to /boot/grub/menu.lst

Code:

title Windows
    rootnoverify (hd0,0)
    chainloader +1

dpeace · 12-28-2007, 10:26 PM

That's brilliant. Works perfectly.

Thank you very much - I needed fast access to a legacy printer only currently accessible through Vista. Will sort that now.

Darren

infinity99 · 12-31-2007, 02:31 PM

hi redazz
I have a similar problem, I can access the windows partitions from fedora but cant boot into Windows.

my menu.lst looks like this:

Code:

#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,4)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.21-2950.fc8xen)
        root (hd0,4)
        kernel /xen.gz-2.6.21-2950.fc8
        module /vmlinuz-2.6.21-2950.fc8xen ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
        module /initrd-2.6.21-2950.fc8xen.img
title Fedora-base (2.6.23.1-42.fc8)
        root (hd0,4)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.23.1-42.fc8 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
        initrd /initrd-2.6.23.1-42.fc8.img
title Other
        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
        chainloader +1

the

Code:

title Other
        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
        chainloader +1

choice asks me to remove all disks and just restarts
please help! want to avoid a reinstall!

thanks.

reddazz · 12-31-2007, 02:36 PM

On what partition is Windows installed? You can check this by doing

Code:

/sbin/fdisk -l

infinity99 · 12-31-2007, 03:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by reddazz

On what partition is Windows installed? You can check this by doing

Code:

/sbin/fdisk -l

Thanks for being so fast.

this is what i get:

Code:

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1         852     6835200    b  W95 FAT32
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2             852        6228    43186176    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3   *        6228        7945    13791232    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda4            7946        9729    14329980    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            7946        7971      208813+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6            7972        9729    14121103+  8e  Linux LVM

so is sda1?

what changes should i make?

reddazz · 01-01-2008, 05:57 AM

sda1 would be the same as hd0,0 in grub terms, so if this is the correct place where Windows is installed, then you do not need to make any changes to your grub configuration file. What I have noticed though is that you have other partitions sda2 (hd0,1) and sda3 (hd0,2) which have ntfs and fat partitions. Could one of these be where Windows is installed and not sda1?

infinity99 · 01-03-2008, 01:19 PM

Thanks for your reply.

I was able to figure myself. It was sda2(hda0,1).