Hi,

I have vista, and when I install ubuntu, I cannot boot vista anymore.

I've edited the menu.lst:
title vista
root (hd0,5)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

my vista is on /dev/sda5.

When I reboot and choose vista, I get:
root (hd0,5)
filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7
savedefault
makeactive
Error 12: Invalid device requested

How can I fix this problem?

Thanks

Post an output of "fdisk -l" and copy/paste the contents of /boot/grub/device.map

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 261 2096451 de Dell Utility
/dev/sda3 262 9729 76051710 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 3449 6032 20755948+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6 6033 9729 29696121 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda7 262 3300 24410704+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 3301 3448 1188778+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table entries are not in disk order

device.map:
(hd0) /dev/sda

Sorry, I have an type error

my vista is on /dev/sda6

Try it using (hd0,3) and (hd0,4) -> edit /boot/grub/menu.lst

One of those should work. I see that you have no /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda4 so i'm thinking that /dev/sda6 would actually be hd0,3

Try them both anyway and see what happens.

hd0,3 no such partition
hd0,4 Invalid device requested

hda4 is missing because logical partitions always start at #5---i.e. there is a presumption that 1-4 are either primary or extended.

But why is hda2 missing?

hda6 in fact becomes hd0,5 in "grubese"

I also note the boot flag on hda1.

Does Windows boot correctly when set up this way? (Install on hda6 (logical) , with boot flag on hda1)

I used to have xp on hda1, and vista on hda6.

I think that's why it works.

But now I replace xp with ubuntu

That may be the problem.
What should I do?

we started saying hda when we should have been saying sda

You say that XP was on sda1, but you replaced it with Ubuntu. That is not what fdisk is telling us.

What configuration do you want to end up with? It might be easier to simply re-install everything.

If you decide to press on, I would say the first thing is to find out where sda2 is. Do you have a live CD with Gparted or QTparted? If you don't figure something out, do this as root:

dd if=/dev/sda skip=446 bs=64 count=1 | hexdump -C

This will give us the raw data in the partition table (post the results here)

When all else fails, read the error message.

Change root (0,5) to rootnoverify (hd0,5) and add boot as the last command.

Grub Manual Reference: 4.2.6 DOS/Windows