Dual Boot Woes

[Thrillho]

General Scenario, 3 hard-drives, 1 with Vista, 1 with Fedora, 1 backup.

I installed Fedora to a hard-drive leaving my Vista drive untouched.

I followed some instructions I found online but I suppose I misinterpreted a step and now I don't have Vista as a boot option.

How can I restore things so that I can get back into Windows and use EasyBCD to edit Windows' boot record(or whatever it's called)

My PC now only opens up into Fedora, while not a problem..I want Windows as a choice as well.

[Thrillho]

I tried to boot the Windows Vista CD but my Vista partition is not listed so I can't repair the startup entry.

[cdnLilWolf]

1. Boot with your Fedora CD/DVD.
2. Choose "Rescue"
3. You don't need networking.
4. At the Command line type... "chroot /mnt/sysimage"
5. Run Grub at the Command line shell
6. At the Grub prompt type... "grub-install /dev/hda" (assuming Vista is on your first drive)
7. type... "root (hd1,0)" (assuming Fedora is on the second drive and the boot area is partition "0")
8. type... "setup (hd0)" (tells grub the MBR is on your Vista drive)
9. Type... "quit" and reboot (and set your BIOS to boot from your hard drive).

That should do it for you. It is important to note that I am guessing the order of your drives.

[linuxguru]

Sounds like you may have altered the boot section of the Vista drive by not installing grub to a Linux partition. Vista is not as easy to fix as having XP on the main drive. Hopefully cdnLilWolf's steps will work. If they don't try removing the other two drives and using Vista to repair the first drive. Boot to the Vista drive and select Repair and let Vista's fix it's own system.

[Thrillho]

Alright well, I appreciate the info posted above.

But here was my solution, Format Vista drive. Presto, no more Windows.

Got my printer working, got VLC and Winamp, i'm good to go.

Eventually i'll install Wine and get my Windows fix this way.

Again, thanks for the informative posts.

[cdnLilWolf]

But here was my solution, Format Vista drive. Presto, no more Windows.


That is certainly one way to get rid of crapware. ;)

Anyway, all kidding aside, does that mean you did not try any of the two solutions?

[Thrillho]

Anyway, all kidding aside, does that mean you did not try any of the two solutions?

Neither of the two.

[Thrillho]

1. Boot with your Fedora CD/DVD.
2. Choose "Rescue"
3. You don't need networking.
4. At the Command line type... "chroot /mnt/sysimage"
5. Run Grub at the Command line shell
6. At the Grub prompt type... "grub-install /dev/hda" (assuming Vista is on your first drive)
7. type... "root (hd1,0)" (assuming Fedora is on the second drive and the boot area is partition "0")
8. type... "setup (hd0)" (tells grub the MBR is on your Vista drive)
9. Type... "quit" and reboot (and set your BIOS to boot from your hard drive).

That should do it for you. It is important to note that I am guessing the order of your drives.

how do i determine which HD has which label? (hd0,0) (hd1,0) etc
this is the content of my MOUNT command, hope it helps.

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 on / type ext3 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/sda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
/dev/sdc1 on /media/Western type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096)
/dev/sdb1 on /media/disk type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096)
/dev/sr0 on /media/UDF Volume type udf (ro,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,uid=500)

SDA1 - Is my Fedora drive.(IDE)
SDC1 - Is my backup drive labeled "Western"(SATA)
SDB1 - Is i'm assuming my Vista drive lol(SATA)

[Thrillho]

figured it out.

thanks!