Grub Trouble/ Not booting into Win XP Home

[Terrizzle]

Hey all,

So I'm fairly new to ubuntu but from what I can tell, I love it so far. BUT, im having trouble which is making me a lil frustrated.

Story:

I have a computer that was really going down the toilet because of a virus. There was no way around it...trust me. So, I installed ubuntu as a second OS and saved my files to a partition created in ubuntu. Then, I re-installed win xp home edition.

Problem:

After reinstalling win xp, I no longer seen grub! It just boot right into XP. I checked disk management in win xp and there are two logical drives that are still assigned to ubuntu. So my files are still there. I just can't get to them!
So what I did now was follow some instructions to get Grub back. It worked...but now when i try to boot into windows. it flashes and goes right back to the OS selection screen. thats it.

how do i fix this????

*by the way, I can boot into Ubuntu No problem*

[tommcd]

So what I did now was follow some instructions to get Grub back. It worked...but now when i try to boot into windows. it flashes and goes right back to the OS selection screen. thats
I can boot into Ubuntu
What exactly did you do to "get grub back"? Did you reinstall grub from the live CD? In any case, you could try to reinstall grub:
First, backup your grub menu.lst:

sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst.bak
Then try reinstalling grub from the Ubuntu live CD:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351&highlight=fsck
If that does not work, then post the output of:


sudo fdisk -l

and post everything after the ### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST in your /boot/grub/menu.lst file.
If Windows is installed to the first primary partition of your hard drive, which it likely is, then you could try adding this to the end of /boot/grub/menu.lst:

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/sda1
title Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

[guywithcable]

It's probably that your menu.lst refers to Windows being on the wrong partition (since I'm assuming you recreated the Windows partition), so it is still referring to the old partition. I think Ubuntu 8.10 now uses UUIDs in menu.lst, so you can use

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuidto find the new partition's UUID. NTFS UUID are about half the size as Linux ones, and don't contain dashes, so that's the one your looking for.

ps: use

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lstto edit menu.lst.

[Terrizzle]

thanks folks :)

well, I actually just removed grub completely that way I was able to boot back into windows. Once I done that, i used a handy little tool that can be found on this site:


http://www.fs-driver.org/

i was able to see my logical drives in Windows and get my files without trying to boot into ubuntu and transfer files that way.

after that, I deleted my logical partitions involved with linux and used partition magic to join the free space leftover to my current partition on windows.

all is well :)

but i'll definitely print out those steps you both have mentioned..that could of helped A LOT before i did my actions lol

thanks again!