dual boot and cyliner boundary problems

[mjd95]

I'm new to linux and I recently tried to install Ubuntu 8.10 alongside Vista on an old laptop. Unfortunately, I ran into a problem almost immediately in finding that whilst ubuntu would boot fine, grub wasn't giving me the option to boot into vista. I've done some looking around and it seems that I'm not the first to come across something like this, and a solution is to add in some code to /boot/grub/menu.lst telling grub to take vista into consideration. Currently my menu.lst file looks like this:


title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic
uuid d050341d-7a8e-4b26-9c94-857fbe813759
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=d050341d-7a8e-4b26-9c94-857fbe813759 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-7-generic
quiet

title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic (recovery mode)
uuid d050341d-7a8e-4b26-9c94-857fbe813759
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=d050341d-7a8e-4b26-9c94-857fbe813759 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-7-generic

title Ubuntu 8.10, memtest86+
uuid d050341d-7a8e-4b26-9c94-857fbe813759
kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin
quiet


Also, the ouput from fdisk is:


Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x40bffd7a

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 702 5632000 27 Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 * 702 8445 62197756 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 8446 9729 10313730 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 8446 9668 9823716 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 9669 9729 489951 82 Linux swap / Solaris

and blkid:


/dev/sda1: UUID="66845D75845D48A7" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda2: UUID="EEB661DBB661A535" LABEL="Vista" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda5: UUID="d050341d-7a8e-4b26-9c94-857fbe813759" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sda6: TYPE="swap" UUID="662c27fe-5006-4640-8a74-33522d840df6"


Now I don't confess to know much about partitioning, and in particular I have no idea what "partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary" means; but I think I would rather that it did end on the cylinder boundary. Is it necessary to resolve this before I can go about telling grub to let vista boot? If so, how do I do this? Finally, once this is resolved, what code should I actually add to menu.lst to get what I want?

Any help is much appreciated.

Edit - Just saw the absolute beginners forum, sorry if this is in the wrong place.

[Pumalite]

You seem to have a Partition Table problem. But let's try this first: add the frollowing to the end of your menu.lst:

title Vista
root (hd0,1)
savedefault
chainloader +1

Reboot and try Vista.

[Pumalite]

If you decide to fix your Partition Table problem; use TestDisk.