Hi there, i have a problem, i recently started to use linux ubuntu along with the windows vista, i had vista before, and past sunday with one friend we installed it from the live cd, using there the partitioning, and everything was okay.
Finally i restarted to see if vista was ok, it was, and the grub was working efficiently, no problems. Then i restarted again because i wanted to install some programming tools such as the LAMP (linux apache mysql php) applications, also netbeans with the jdk application because i'm studying computer engineering and i needed those programs, anyway, after doing all those things, my day ends and I'm happy to have 2 operative systems, and nothing happened to windows vista
But yesterday, I used again vista for a while, then, when i tried to use ubuntu, the grub wasn't working, it just said Loading Grub 1.5, and then restarted, and so on and so on.
After looking a solution for this problem, with a group of friends, we reinstalled grub, using the live cd, and no problems. But then again, now i used the vista again, and when i wanted to use linux, the same problem, i had to reinstall grub again. I think vista is damaging in some way the grub. I don't think any of these programs i downloaded damaged grub.
Please help me fixing this problem, and thank you very much for aiding me in this situation. My laptop is an HP Pavilion dv6000
thank you very much

Lots of successful dual booters around, seems like an odd problem. Have you done any diagnostics on the drive to ensure that you don't have a hardware problem?

That's an old sore, windows not playing nicely with other operating systems. For a long time it was XP but now with the new boot features of VISTA, we may be back to scratch. If you need a failsafe grub, it may be best to install it to a floppy or so. Another thing I would like to point out is that partitioning Vista from Linux may not be the best option at this time. It was all one could do back in the XP days but now that Vista has a partitioner of its own, it may be safer - and given your issue, it probably really is - to free up some space before installing Linux.

well, i don't think it has any hardware problems, i defragmented the disk and ran a recovery file system before i installed linux, besides this laptop is new, anyway, i'm just using ubuntu by now, i've seen guys using the magic partitioner, should I reinstall ubuntu using this partitioner? i used the partitioner ubuntu uses in its live cd

It may be worthwhile giving it a shot if you haven't invested too much time yet in setting up Ubuntu to your taste. I remember having a similar issue last year. I had had XP resized from a gparted liveCD months before and then one day GRUB failed completely. Because XP doesn't have a partitioner of its own, I thought it would be best to wipe all of the disk and I reinstalled XP to a much smaller partition so that I wouldn't ever have to resize it again. No more problems since that day.