Niroth
July 6th, 2010, 03:18 PM
Hey All-
I'm sure there are 1000 10.4 / Win7 dual boot questions a day, but hopefully this a little unique.
I previously had my old Vista and Win 7 dual booting on the single hard drive in the system. I hadn't booted into Vista in months so I decided to put Ubuntu back on (previously Ubuntu had been installed but was removed to make room for the Win7 install).
I deleted the Vista partition and installed Ubuntu on the free space from that partition. After rebooting I was surprised to see grub did not automatically add Win7 to the boot list.
After doing some further digging I realized that when I installed Win7 it did not move the Windows BCD to the Win7 partition and had been booting from the Vista partition all along. I've tried everything I can think of, including rebuilding /boot and the BCD for win 7 manually, but still can't seem to get it to boot again. If I add it to GRUB2 using the 40_custom method and attempt to boot it I just got the blinking "_" cursor forever.
One question I had for folks who dual boot 10.4 with 7 is which partition do you have flagged as "BOOT" (aka active)? I have heard the Windows boot loader can be picky about this.
Realizing this is an Ubuntu forum - but does anyone have any other tips they may have learned about what might make the Win7 boot loader not want to go? I know in the past Windows needed to be on the first partition? The old Vista partition / the new Ubuntu one is the first on disk while the Win7 partition is "later" on the disk (and seen by grub as /dev/sda6).
Thanks for any help, especially realizing this is probably not Ubuntu or GRUB at fault!
I'm sure there are 1000 10.4 / Win7 dual boot questions a day, but hopefully this a little unique.
I previously had my old Vista and Win 7 dual booting on the single hard drive in the system. I hadn't booted into Vista in months so I decided to put Ubuntu back on (previously Ubuntu had been installed but was removed to make room for the Win7 install).
I deleted the Vista partition and installed Ubuntu on the free space from that partition. After rebooting I was surprised to see grub did not automatically add Win7 to the boot list.
After doing some further digging I realized that when I installed Win7 it did not move the Windows BCD to the Win7 partition and had been booting from the Vista partition all along. I've tried everything I can think of, including rebuilding /boot and the BCD for win 7 manually, but still can't seem to get it to boot again. If I add it to GRUB2 using the 40_custom method and attempt to boot it I just got the blinking "_" cursor forever.
One question I had for folks who dual boot 10.4 with 7 is which partition do you have flagged as "BOOT" (aka active)? I have heard the Windows boot loader can be picky about this.
Realizing this is an Ubuntu forum - but does anyone have any other tips they may have learned about what might make the Win7 boot loader not want to go? I know in the past Windows needed to be on the first partition? The old Vista partition / the new Ubuntu one is the first on disk while the Win7 partition is "later" on the disk (and seen by grub as /dev/sda6).
Thanks for any help, especially realizing this is probably not Ubuntu or GRUB at fault!