[Solved] Problems booting Windows from Grub

Schwinni · Last edited by Schwinni on Sun Nov 02, 2008 4:44 am; edited 1 time in total

Hi all,

I installed Gentoo on my brother's notebook.
The situation was:
2 (primary) partitions, both NTFS, one for the system and one for data.

I changed the partitions to make space for Gentoo by shrinking C: and D: and moving D: to the end of the disk.
That all worked.
Then I created one primary for swap and another for Gentoo itself.

The situation now is:
/dev/sda1 NTFS (Windows XP)
/dev/sda2 swap
/dev/sda3 ext3 (Gentoo) (yes, I know, no extra partition for boot and home... :wink:

)
/dev/sda4 NTFS (user data)

The Gentoo installation went fine and everything concerning Linux works fine (except the FN keys, but that is something for another thread).

The problem is with Windows:
For Windows I created an entry in Grub:

Schwinni · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 10:01 am Post subject:

Oh sorry, wrong forum I think.
Should me moved to Installing Gentoo....

Schwinni · Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2008 2:14 pm Post subject:

I have found out something else:
Every time when Gentoo is booted the "boot" flag is set /dev/sda3.
Why is that?

cyrillic · Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2008 3:58 pm Post subject:

Can you post the entire contents of grub.conf ?

BTW, using grub's "makeactive" command is almost always a mistake. The Windows installer makes the correct partition "active", and this should never need to be changed after that.

Schwinni · Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2008 4:09 pm Post subject:

Thanks for being the first to answer!

cyrillic · Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2008 4:22 pm Post subject:

Try changing the Windows part of grub.conf to this.

Schwinni · Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2008 8:33 pm Post subject:

OK, I followed your advice and removed the makeactive and added (hd0,0) to the chainloader statement.
The error message is away now, but it still doens't boot.
Grub just shows me

jcat · Veteran Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 1337

I would change your XP grub entry to be more standard again (remove the extra hd0,0 entry, but still leave the makeactive statement out)

gentoo_ram · Posted: Sat Nov 01, 2008 12:15 am Post subject:

Maybe you're installing GRUB wrong? It should be:

Schwinni · Posted: Sat Nov 01, 2008 12:31 am Post subject:

No, no worries, I installed Grub into the MBR.

But it seems like the Windows partition is f***ed up anyway:

I found an old boot CD from Paragon Partition Manager and let the boot code (of the Windows partition) repair with it.
After that Grub booted Windows, but I got the message that ntoskrnl.exe is missing. LOL
Seems it was broke, so I expanded it from the Windows CD.
After that it booted a bit further and the computer restarted then. Booting to safe mode shows, that some more files are loaded now, but I cannot read fast enough to see which file fails.
Since chkdsk from the Windows CD finds no errors, I'm gonna do a repair of Windows.
Of course I'll have to install Grub again afterwards...

jcat · Veteran Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 1337

I hate to admin to knowing anything about Windows (I'm always trying to block out the pain!), but have you looked for the missing boot files on your NTFS data partition (/dev/sda4)?

I think (from memory) if you somehow manage to set up a partition other than C: as the system/boot drive (or something like that) from within Windows disk manager, it will put all important Windows boot files on that partition.

Cheers,
jcat

Schwinni · Posted: Sun Nov 02, 2008 4:44 am Post subject:

I reinstalled Windows and it boots now.
Something was really broken.

I still have to add (hd0,0) to the chainloader statement, but I don't care - it boots...