Dear Linux Community,
I was hoping you could help me with a problem I have been having. I installed Gentoo using a minimal install CD with a grub bootloader and unfortunately I am having trouble booting my existing windows partition. When grub starts, I get the option to boot through linux (which works as expected) or boot through windows Vista. I select the windows Vista option and I get the following respective window displaying the following error message:
Code:
Booting 'Microsoft Windows Vista'
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
Error 13: Invalid or unsupported executable format
Press any key to continue...
Since this process fails, I tried using the grub command line to gain some insight on my problem. I utilize the TAB completion interface to verify what is going on. After I type
rootnoverify( and use the tab completion it successfully shows that one of the possible disks to boot from is hd0.
When I type
rootnoverify(hd0, and use tab completion, I get the following message:
Code:
Possible partitions are:
Partition num: 0, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7
Partition num: 1, Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
Partition num: 2, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x82
Partition num: 3, Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
My partitions are set in the following manner:
Partition 0: Windows vista partition
Partition 1: Linux boot partition
Partition 2: Linux swap partition
Partition 3: Linux root partition
At first, I thought that my windows partition might be damaged and the filesystem type cannot be detected by grub. I loaded linux in order to gain some more insight regarding my current partitions and their respective filetypes. I ran the following commands in the linux terminal with the following results:
Code:
#fdisk /dev/sda
The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 19457. There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Command (m for help):p
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/trac, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier 0x495d0lab
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 17322 139132336 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 * 17322 17326 38727+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 17327 17389 506047+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4 17390 19457 16611210 83 Linux
I am confused since linux recognizes my filesystem type for the windows partition sda1, whereas grub has a problem recognizing the NTFS filesystem type. I am guessing that the problem might be the the filesystem type is HPFS/NTFS.
I was hoping someone could help me fix this issue. At this point, recovering the files in my windows partition is my top priority. I am willing to reinstall linux at any time. Please note that I have no preference in terms of using grub as a bootloader. I used to have the default windows boot loader load both windows or Ubuntu at any time and worked perfectly. Any insight regarding on how to solve this problem would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!