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Holy Shit: A Tale of Partitions and Boot Loaders
outsie
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I feel bad that I only really come out of lurk mode here to ask for help, but this is some fucked up shit here guys, and I have no idea what to do. Here's the really long version, you probably only need to read the bolded bit at the end.
I've been bouncing around between a couple different operating systems on my eee pc (1005ha) since I got it a couple weeks ago. Up until today, I had Windows 7, XP, Moblin and Jolicloud all on different partitions. I had almost never used Jolicloud or Moblin since I threw them on, so like an hour ago I decided to just delete the partitions I had created for them and make three big ones, one for XP, one for Windows 7, and one just for storage. I used the Windows 7 formatting tool to do this, leaving four partitions, the extra one being a little 47 mb thing I assumed Asus had thrown on there, and everything seemed peachy.
This is where the shit hits. I had noticed that Moblin had thrown on its own boot loader back when I installed it, requiring me to use their linux boot loader to switch over to the Windows boot loader to start up XP or Windows 7. This was only a minor hassle, and I was too lazy to uninstall Moblin just to skip a 2 second annoyance. Well, apparently I fucked something up with Moblin's boot loader while deleting partitions, so when I rebooted, and after rebooting a couple times again, I'm getting a prompt for "GNU grub" which I guess is the boot loader Moblin used. I don't know shit about Unix or Linux, so I'm at a complete loss here. I'm fairly certain my Windows partitions are still perfectly intact, I just don't know how to get to them/recover the classic Windows boot loader.
Ahhhhhhh
I've been bouncing around between a couple different operating systems on my eee pc (1005ha) since I got it a couple weeks ago. Up until today, I had Windows 7, XP, Moblin and Jolicloud all on different partitions. I had almost never used Jolicloud or Moblin since I threw them on, so like an hour ago I decided to just delete the partitions I had created for them and make three big ones, one for XP, one for Windows 7, and one just for storage. I used the Windows 7 formatting tool to do this, leaving four partitions, the extra one being a little 47 mb thing I assumed Asus had thrown on there, and everything seemed peachy.
This is where the shit hits. I had noticed that Moblin had thrown on its own boot loader back when I installed it, requiring me to use their linux boot loader to switch over to the Windows boot loader to start up XP or Windows 7. This was only a minor hassle, and I was too lazy to uninstall Moblin just to skip a 2 second annoyance. Well, apparently I fucked something up with Moblin's boot loader while deleting partitions, so when I rebooted, and after rebooting a couple times again, I'm getting a prompt for "GNU grub" which I guess is the boot loader Moblin used. I don't know shit about Unix or Linux, so I'm at a complete loss here. I'm fairly certain my Windows partitions are still perfectly intact, I just don't know how to get to them/recover the classic Windows boot loader.
Ahhhhhhh
outsie on
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Boot from your Windows 7 disc, go to Recovery Console, then try
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
which should theoretically completely repair the Vista/7 bootloader.
Also the 7 disc comes with a repair wizard that tries to automatically detect Windows installations. See if that works.
I'm not sure why the Vista repair wizard failed (although the workings of such wizards tend to be well-hidden, anyhow). It should have worked, even with 7. Odd. Well, if it didn't work, back to editing Grub.
... your Grub loader still works, right? Point it to your Windows install as appropriate, again, then use EasyBCD once you get into Windows 7.
Now, a different (but much less scary) problem. After installing Ubuntu I saw that the boot loader had a couple options for booting into Ubuntu, and one for Win7, but none for XP. I booted into Win7, and used EasyBCD to install the Vista loader, which let me boot directly into Win7, with no menu. I could also use it to uninstall the Vista loader, letting me boot directly into XP. So, I can now use EasyBCD to switch the computer between being XP or Win7, but I'd really like to have a menu when I boot up allowing me to choose.
I'm really not great with this stuff, despite having four operating systems at once I've never really delved into anything deeper than installing them and trying them out...
GRUB stands for "Grand Unified Bootloader" and has been the standard bootloader in the Linux kernel since LILO (the "Linux Loader") became deprecated a number of years ago. You can get it to boot basically anything that uses a BIOS (basically everything except Mac OS X), you just have to modify your menu.lst file.
I'm going to assume that you have all your operating systems installed, you just need to be able to see Windows in the GRUB startup menu.
1. First, boot into whatever Linux distribution you are using. Log in to an account that has root access (either root itself, or an account that can use sudo.
2. Open xterm (or whatever terminal emulator you use; my personal favourite is aterm).
3. The above command will give you superuser access for a period of time, allowing you to open and edit the menu.lst in nano, a simple text editor.
4. Scroll on down until you see something similar to this:
It will most likely list a bunch of different ones for whatever distro you are using. We are going to want to add something like the above to the menu.lst
5. Basically, enter in the above exactly - title, root (we'll deal with this in a second), savedefault, makeactive, and chainloader +1 - all in that order. Basically, it gives you a name for the thing you are looking to boot, it specifies which disk and partition the OS is on, it makes sure the relevant settings are active and finally uses the chainloader mechanism to load up Windows.
6. in Grub, disks and partitions are labeled in an X, Y format. So the first disk with two partitions will have two possibles combinations of (hd0,0) and (hd0,1). You must find out which disk has which data where, as if you don't label the disk properly nothing will work. GRUB's disk identification doesn't correspond in anyway to the way Linux itself does it, but instead relates entirely to the physical location of where the drives/how they are connected. So if you have two SATA drives, one connected on SATA0, one on SATA1, (hd0,0) will be the first partition of drive one, which is connected to SATA0, and so on.
Trial and error is probably your best bet.
7. When you have finished editing the necessary changes in menu.lst, save (control-O) and exit nano (control-X). Exit the *term, and then reboot and see if your changes worked. If they don't, make sure you have the right disk and partition, and keep trying. If you've tried all possible combinations, come back and we'll see if there are specific issues that you need to resolve beyond that.
Hope that helps.
Well, EasyBCD should give you options. Not having it installed I can't be entirely helpful here, but I'll try my best.
You need the Windows Vista/7 bootloader installed (to boot the more recent 7), then you need to tell that bootloader to show you options for XP. I think this page has pretty screenshots. Essentially, go to Add/Remove entries, and add Windows XP. Not too involving.
I'm not sure. Is the 100ha's hard drive an SSD? Is it IDE/SATA?
Edit: Also, I don't have a flash drive/sd card big enough for Windows 7 at the moment.