I have a Pentium 4 with 2GB memory and 3 SATA drives. My first drive had Vista loaded and on the second I had UBUNTU 6.10. They were working fine until I decided to Install SUSE 10.0 on the third drive as I had it before and wanted to get back to it. The installation went fine except that GRUB loader that SUSE installed has an entry for Windows and bombs with ERROR 15 when I tried to access it. I can boot UBUNTU and SUSE from the menu no problem. How can I get back to accessing the windows. Vista had a root entry (hd0,0). Many thanks.

From the information you give, I assume that when you installed Suse, you elected to install Suse's grub to the MBR instead of the the root of the Suse partition. Now it's broken; reason unknown.

Easiest way to fix this, boot Ubuntu from the install cd. Re-install Ubuntu's grub to the MBR. Before doing anything else, mount the Suse partition and open Suse's /boot/grub/menu.lst and copy the menu entry for Suse (you will have to either add the Suse partition to /etc/fstab, or just create a mount point for it for a one-time mount). Close that file, then open Ubuntu's /boot/grub/menu.lst and paste the Suse entry there.

Reboot. Try all three OSs to see that they are all bootable.

Come back here with any problems you have. Also post the menu.lst entries for all three OSs.

Many thanks. I will try and get back tou with the entries for OS. It was my mistake in not paying enough attention to the SUSE grub install.

Many thanks again. It worked. I was able to reload GRUB to MBR and the original settings were usable. There are some good GRUB related forums also that were useful. Regards

You have any links?

I am getting the winload.exe error

What does your Grub say? I am going to try to repair the Vista install but there was no "partition that had vista" or so it reported.. How freaking lame.

Dear EclipseAgent:

There is a software from PROnetworks called VistaBoot PRO 3.1 ( you can download it for free) that fixes Vista Boot and also other Windows boot if there are other versions.

As for GRUB I found the following thread useful

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351

Hope this helps. Cheers

I looked at VistaBoot but I wanted to try and fix myself..

I did find the problems however.. When I did an upgrade of XP to Vista I was able to go into Vista and Linux using Grub without an issue (after re-installing grub).

After a Clean install of Vista and re-installed grub, I was unable to log on with the winload error.. What was the problem? Well for some reason vista put the boot stuff on D although I installed on C (D was the bigger partition)..

Once I got all that cleared out with bcdedit, etc. I was a ok to go, and now have both..

What a mess vista's boot process is.

I thoroughly agree with you about vista boot, what a performance! Another reason I won't be using Vista (at the mo!!)

The reason for the problem: ntldr has been depricated in favor of the new un-linux friendly winboot.exe. I've read in a few places about the hoops that must be jumped through to get a dual-boot with vista to work...

J

Vista can be booted no different to any Dos and Windows.

Yes it ditched the NTLDR and has its own MBR too but Grub boots it just the same. I reported my experience in

Thread one

Tread two which has a couple Windows and Suse around it.

saikee, I have read that the final RTM version of Vista does give GRUB problems. I am guessing your posts (from the dates) are the Release Candidate version? I have had no problem booting either RC1 or 2 but would be interested to hear if there is really a problem with the final.

2damncommon,

Yep, mine was a free version. It is possible Vista would try to make it harder for Linux boot loaders to boot it but it will affect the NT versions of Windows, BSD and Solaris too, especially if it deviates from the established PC standard. No matter what it does it cannot survive without a MBR section as no Bios would read more than that.