GRUB Confusion!!!!

[finch127]

my god that worked!!! thank you so much, i can actually boot now, into ubuntu at least, thats great

i love intrepid, but man ive been beating my brains out over this

i cant thank you enough!!

[caljohnsmith]

That's great news--I'm glad you can boot Ubuntu now. So which (hdX,0) worked? I hope it was (hd0,0), because that would mean you are booting the Ubuntu sdb drive on start up. If that is the case, you can add the following entry to your menu.lst to boot Windows, and it should work if there are no other issues with Windows:

title	   Windows
root       (hd1,0)
map        (hd0) (hd1)
map        (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1

One more thing you will probably want to do is restore a Windows MBR to your Windows HDD so you can boot into Windows from that drive independent of your Ubuntu drive. But first let me know what happens when you choose the above Windows entry from Grub on start up.

[finch127]

well ubuntu works good now, i can keep booting in and out

but windows, whenever I select windows it says

starting up...
GRUB _


i presume because there is no bootloader?

[finch127]

(I will be leaving shortly so I think that about does it, but I presume all I would need to do is restore the windows bootloader to my drive SCSI? I have the cd with windows and i know how to use fixmbr, so i think thats the way to go.)

Again thank you very much!

[caljohnsmith]

If you used the Windows entry from post #12, it tries to boot the Windows partition; so if you are getting that strange Grub behavior, I would start by reinstalling the boot sector of the Windows partition, which you can do with:

fixboot

And like you mentioned, be sure to also run:

fixmbr

To install a Windows MBR into that drive. Also, I would also run:

chkdsk /r

To make sure there aren't other file system issues. If you still can't boot Windows from Grub after doing the above commands, then try changing your BIOS to directly boot the Windows drive and see if Windows boots that way. Let me know what happens and we can work from there.

P.S. I'm going to also be leaving in about half an hour and won't be back until tomorrow morning probably. We can pick up from there if you are still having problems.

[finch127]

alright, so sorry to bother you again

but man...

after some time of great linuxing, i was in a system update and the power went out right when it was doing my kernel headers etc.

now when ever i try to start up in grub, it says error 15 file not found!

(and i decided to ditch windows, so the other issue is not longer a concern)

[finch127]

oh and for some reason, memtest 86+ works?

i tried it, it did some stuff and rebooted

[caljohnsmith]

Sorry to hear you ran into problems again. Is Ubuntu still the same as before, on the sdb drive? If so, from your Live CD first do:

sudo fsck -y /dev/sdb1

Let me know if that returns any errors, and then continue with:

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
sudo blkid
ls -l /mnt/boot
cat /mnt/boot/grub/menu.lst

Note the "-l" is a lowercase L, not a one. Please post the output of all the above commands, and we can work from there.

[finch127]

actually, dont worry about it, thanks to what you taught me i fixed it

i realized that the only way that would happen is if menu.lst was not updated after the headers were installed so sure enough, i booted with livecd and i looked at the /boot folder

i saw vmlinuz blah-blah.7-generic and img blah blah.7-generic

but when i went to menu.lst, there was a 5 instead of a 7 on the entry just like i thought, so i used sudo gedit and replaced the 5's with 7's and rebooted

the error 15 was because it was trying to boot from the earlier kernel and the new one was there but it did not know about it, i suppose

but then everything worked like a charm, ill just re update and plug up the battery just to be sure

thanks for your help though man!