[gamelord12]

Okay, I used to have just XP when I first got my machine. In February, I partitioned it and added Vista onto the second partition and I would dual-boot between the two of them, As Vista became more and more efficient/compatible, I used XP less and less. Recently, I completely stopped using XP because Vista now runs everything I have or a program that does the same exact thing. So, after hearing some good things about Ubuntu on Digg articles, I decided to give that a try. I resized my XP partition down to 30 GB, booted back up to it to make sure that everything worked fine (both XP and Vista still worked) and rebooted one more time to the Ubuntu disc to install it. I reformatted the XP partition to ext2 and installed Ubuntu.

Ubuntu works fine, but I can't boot to Vista anymore. All my files on that partition are fine--I can browse to them from Ubuntu easily. But my whole life is pretty much on Vista. My iPod syncs up to it, my schedule is on Outlook, my webcam only works on Windows (can't video chat anymore), and I can't play my favorite games. I'm confident that I will eventually be able to boot back up to it again because I can still access the files, but it's very frustrating to not be able to use Vista right now.

I went to the Ubuntu forums...

http://ubuntuforums....ad.php?t=499467

...and posted the same thing there, but responses are kind of slow and the people who were helping me before haven't posted in over a day.

The old boot loader I used was apparently the one that Windows uses (BCDEdit or something) but my computer is using the Linux boot loader now (grub, I believe) and even after the modifications I've made (see the Ubuntu forum link above), it still won't recognize Windows. If I could get the old Windows boot loader back, with full access to Ubuntu, that would be preferable. If not, could anyone please help me to get the Ubuntu boot loader to recognize Windows? I've got the hard drive space to back everything up on my slave drive and re-install both OSes, but it would take weeks to set up everything the way I like it again,

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I am not all that familiar with Windoze, but I believe that the dual boot in Windoze uses the first partition for the booting, meaning that there was more information on the XP partition. Linux basically does the same thing, but you can put the /boot partition on a separate partition so that it is independent from the OS.

So, I am not sure that restoring the boot loader will resolve the problem. You might see if there is a repair feature for Vista so that it puts what it needs to have on the partition.

You can check the grub boot menu.lst file in /boot/grub and see if the Windoze partition is listed as the correct partition and if not, then try changing it to correct location.

Example:

title Windoze
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

The partition number starts at 0, instead of 1.

Edited by Kemasa, 14 July 2007 - 04:41 PM.

[Kemasa]

I am not all that familiar with Windoze, but I believe that the dual boot in Windoze uses the first partition for the booting, meaning that there was more information on the XP partition. Linux basically does the same thing, but you can put the /boot partition on a separate partition so that it is independent from the OS.

So, I am not sure that restoring the boot loader will resolve the problem. You might see if there is a repair feature for Vista so that it puts what it needs to have on the partition.

You can check the grub boot menu.lst file in /boot/grub and see if the Windoze partition is listed as the correct partition and if not, then try changing it to correct location.

Example:

title Windoze
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

The partition number starts at 0, instead of 1.

Edited by Kemasa, 14 July 2007 - 04:41 PM.

[silverbeard]

Vista doesn't use the same type of boot.ini as XP and has to be configured to load in a dual boot environment. This article should help you out.

[gamelord12]

Okay, forget Linux. If I just deleted the Linux partition so that the only thing left to my drive was the Vista partition, would it boot okay?

[silverbeard]

You would have to fix the MBR to load Vista. I'm not familiar with Vista and how to repair it. You should ask about that in the Vista Forum.