Dual-booting not working! PLEASE help!

[Dark-Star]

I am at my wit's end trying to rebuild my old machine. Some time ago my IDE drive sprouted a bad spot and ******* XP refused to boot. Just recently I got a new SATA drive from a friend, reformatted/repartitioned it and tried rebuilding.

Ubuntu, of course, installed without a fuss. XP sees the two NTFS partitions and installs just dandy...but when I reloaded the GRUB bootloader (which XP knocked out) I cannot. readd. Windows. for the life of me.

A SS of my SATA drive:

http://www.fileden.com/files/2009/5/9/2435913/Screenshot--dev-sda%20-%20GParted.png



file:///tmp/moz-screenshot.jpg

[lindsay7]

Looks like you need to set sda5 a boot flag which you can do with Gparted and you may need to make some changes in the grub menu.

Post the output of
Sudo fdisk -l that is the letter l

and also the output of

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst again this is the letter l in lst

[Dark-Star]

Righty-oh!

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 4 32098+ 6 FAT16
/dev/sda2 5 38913 312536542+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 5 9735 78164226 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6 9736 26148 131837391 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda7 26149 28580 19535008+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 28581 28945 2931831 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda9 28946 38913 80067928+ b W95 FAT32

Disk /dev/sdb: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2cf22cf2

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 10199 81923436 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2 10200 26134 127997887+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb3 26135 38913 102647317+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

The last 3 are my old busted drive, FYI.

----


title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
uuid f547d156-0194-4e65-bcb4-4d0ab1b10ffe
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=f547d156-0194-4e65-bcb4-4d0ab1b10ffe ro splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
quiet

title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic (recovery mode)
uuid f547d156-0194-4e65-bcb4-4d0ab1b10ffe
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=f547d156-0194-4e65-bcb4-4d0ab1b10ffe ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic

title Ubuntu 9.04, memtest86+
uuid f547d156-0194-4e65-bcb4-4d0ab1b10ffe
kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin
quiet

title MS Windows XP
root (hd0,4)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

^my pitiful attempt at getting MS booting.

[merlinus]

If windows is on sda5, then set a boot flag on it. menu.lst entry for windows is correct if sda5, but a problem may be that most often windows wants to be on a primary, not logical, partition.

[Dark-Star]

Oog. Can I delete the partitions and move the free space to a primary partition with gparted...WITHOUT wrecking my very customized Ubuntu install?

[brncao]

yep. just make sure you don't accidently format it.

[lindsay7]

When you get done and reinstall windows on your new partition. You may have to set the grub menu up again. Type these commands in the terminal if you can not boot into Ubuntu after windows is installed.

sudo grub
find /boot/grub/stage1
(it will give a (hdx,y)
root (hdx,y)
setup (hdx)
quit

[Dark-Star]

Okay...sorry to be a pest but one last question - how do I move the free space as mentioned before? I tried several times but only made a big mess of things, thankfully changes aren't applied right away...

[lindsay7]

I am not sure what you are asking, First delete the partitions you do not want. Leave them all unallocated, then make a new primary partition for your windows system. You want the windows partition to be first on the drive. You could grow the first fat32 partiton which is small to take on this space.

There are little arrows on each side of the partition and you can change the size and you can move the partitions around clicking on it and holding it.

If you go to the web site for Gparted you can find a very good tutorial on how to do everything that this program offers.