My Sad Story...

[Niloc]

I had a perfect system, one 80 gig drive with Windows 2000, one 40 gig drive with Ubuntu and a menu on boot to choose between them.

My wife wanted a Karaoke program and I bought a new AMD 64 computer for my Ubuntu. My wife took the old desktop down to the local guru to get a Karaoke program, when it came back all it had was Windows XP!! The Ubuntu drive was still there but the boot selection at startup had vanished, all it would do was run Win XP. no sigh of Ubuntu....

So I thought the best thing to do was what I did at first, install Ubuntu and my boot menu would re-appear.... Wrong, all I can get now is Ubuntu, Windows XP has vanished, no boot menu, nothing, just Ubuntu!!

My wife is not happy, I am not happy what have I done? I am sure both systems are there, they are on two separate hard drives but where us the boot choice menu?

The option of 'press del on startup' refuses to work, F4 offers a choice of one HD (Ubuntu), the floppy and the CD, F11 about the same.

Where is the boot menu supposed to be? What is its name? Can I edit it and what do I put in it?

Any assistance will be greatly appreciated....

Colin

[Simmo]

man grub

[hans1977]

Hi,

You should be able to boot Win XP just by adding an entry for it in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

/Hans

[Niloc]

I have just finished a long session on Ubuntu Forums fixing that Hans, now I get 'NTLDR Missing' press Ctrl Alt Del to restart which is of course useless. Where is NTLDR supposed to be and how do I kick it off?

[RKASA]

I have never been a big fan of dual boot. Swapping drives and Ext drives are alot less trouble. I use a few distro of linux because I like checking out differant ones including live cd's. I install most of them on usb ext. drives and pull my XP drive loose then it is never in danger and the linux OS's run fine in their own drive, if I want to change linux OS I can just wipe it and start a new install to that drive. No partition madness. I keep my fav. linux on another box. The only reason I test most the other linux on the XP box is the drive is set up to where I can pop it out in 2 sec. I had nightmare problems running 98se and mandrake 7.0 on a dual boot years ago and as a result the mandrake ended up collecting dust for years. When I got back into linux I ruled dual boot out right away. My BIOS is not set up for USB boot, but if there is no cd and the HD is missing it assumes LAN and possable USB LAN connection and goes looking for a bootable OS on usb, so if linux is out there it fires up.

[jackk]

Looks like your boot.ini doesn't point to the correct partition after all the changes done.

You have to boot on your win CD then get to the recovery console/prompt and type "fixboot". Windows is dumb but will be able to retrieve its own partition

[Richard-BKK]

NTLDR Missing is easily fixed.....

Windows XP users

1. Insert the Windows XP bootable CD into the computer.

2. When prompted to press any key to boot from the CD, press any key.

3. Once in the Windows XP setup menu press the "R" key to repair Windows.

4. Log into your Windows installation by pressing the "1" key and pressing enter.

5. You will then be prompted for your administrator password, enter that password.

6. Copy the below two files to the root directory of the primary hard disk. In the below example we are copying these files from the CD-ROM drive letter "E". This letter may be different on your computer.

copy e:\i386\ntldr c:\

copy e:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\

7. Once both of these files have been successfully copied, remove the CD from the computer and reboot.

Your Linux installation get lost after Windows XP is installed.....

[RJJ]

All Linux distributions tell you to load Windows first because Windows is not good at sharing, but Linux can then go and fix the situation.

If you are sure your Linux install is OK on the 40GB, then unplug it for a little while.

Beg, borrow or steal (I recommend begging or borrowing) a HDD from somewhere and mount it instead of the 40GB.

Now you have your 80GB with Windows XP as your primary and a blank other hard disk.

Install your Linux onto this other hard drive.

When the installation is complete, shut down and put your 40GB back in place of the borrowed disk.

Reboot and you should have your boot menu to XP and your Linux distribution, just as it was.

[Thanh-BKK]

Hello

Why not use one of MANY available third-party boot managers that support any OS you can find?

I found Ubuntu can be the bitchiest OS around...... when trying to have it beside XP on a second partition, but same HDD. During install it ONLY offered "Whole Drive" or "Partition 0" which is where Windows was - completely ignoring the beautiful, free, 40 GB partition which was supposed for it.

Im still using Linux only to play with... still way too geeky for Joe Normal. But Ubuntu is certainly the best looking Linux out there.

Best regards....

Thanh

[rch1023]

Slightly off topic, but I'm not happy with Ubuntu. I installed it to make some changes to a Perl-driven website. I needed some non-standard perl modules, but could I install then under Ubuntu? No way! Enquiries on their help-channel got me nowhere, so I went back to Suse.

- Roger -

BTW: I've never had any problem recovering lost partitions with their systems intact. Lots of sweat and panic, but it always worked in the end. Best of luck.

[Niloc]

Well I discovered the clown swapped the hard drives and made the 40 gig the master and the 80 the slave. Of course the system kept trying to boot off the 80, Ubuntu installed itself on the 80 which scrubbed WinXP, eventually I removed the 40, reset the jumper on the 80 to make it the sole HD, reinstalled Windows and went back to my AMD64 for my Ubuntu fix.

Now I have to get rid of Bills messages trying to get me to tell him I have pirated his crappy old system!!

Anyone ever used BTOS or CTOS? Now there was an operating system!!