grub + Windows Vista = immediate computer reboot

mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3224

Hi all,

I'm helping out a remote user who has Windows Vista and a fresh linux install on their machine. Grub loads Linux perfect, but when loading Windows Vista, the machine immediately reboots... no error or anything.

As far as I can tell the ntfs partition mounts fine and doesn't appear corrupted. I've installed next to vista before and never have seen this issue.

This is the grub entry for vista:

d2_racing · Posted: Wed Nov 28, 2007 3:47 am Post subject:

Are you sure that your Vista is your first partition.

Maybe you could post the content of

mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3224

Unfortunately I'm not in front of the machine at the moment, and I won't get remote access to it again until tomorrow morning.

The fdisk output looks something like this (I'm recreating it from memory):

d2_racing · Posted: Wed Nov 28, 2007 11:51 am Post subject:

no problem

mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3224

Here is the real fdisk output:

neiljw · Posted: Wed Nov 28, 2007 5:06 pm Post subject:

It sounds to me like the Windows bootloader has been zapped. That can be repaired using the Vista install CD, I believe.
_________________
Be lucky,

Neil

d2_racing · Posted: Wed Nov 28, 2007 5:23 pm Post subject:

And if you do this, you will need to reinstall grub after that

mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3224

I think you are right. For some reason after installing grub on the system (in the MBR) Windows just won't boot anymore. Restoring the Windows MBR seems to have restored Vista on the disk. I used a tool called EasyBCD to add Linux to the Vista bootloader instead. I'm not really sure what went wrong in the case of this machine.

d2_racing · Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2007 2:03 am Post subject:

I have vista on my Laptop and I use Grub to boot my Gentoo box and Vista.

I have no answer for that

whiskcat · n00b Joined: 19 Mar 2005 Posts: 8

So by using EasyBCD, you've updated the Vista boot loader to display Vista or Linux. If you choose Linux, does that then go into GRUB, where you can chose between between several Linux's, assuming several kernels are available and have been defined to GRUB menu lst?

I've read several articles on the web, where after installing grub to the linux boot(?) partition, the first 512 bytes have to be copied to Vista, and you tell EasyBCD the name of the file. Does this still have to be done?

Also, where GRUB is installed on the linux file system, does it have to be in an extended partition?