Dual Booting

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XysteR

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Hey, i can't seem to get my dual booting Ubuntu Jaunty with Vista working...
When i install Vista first then Jaunty, It picks up the windows installation, and adds it to GRUB, and everything seems fine until I try select windows vista from the GRUB loader whereupon i get a GRUB error 21 (cant find file/directory, cant remember), or BOOTMGR missing error. If i install windows 2nd, it overwrites GRUB and i dont know how to fix this? So either windows or linux is working, cant get both to work at the same time. Windows is on hd0, first partition and Jaunty is on hd0, 2nd partition. if i try to repair windows, it fails and i have to re-install it :( so now that im using windows and have Jaunty installed on the 2nd partition, how do i just add grub to the bootloader so that i can select either one from here
 
Personally I've always been against dualbooting, it's should only be an option if you have one drive.

What I do is have 1 drives for each OS, when i install to one drive I unplug the power cable of the drive I want to avoid installing too, after installation I reattach the power cable then just use the bios boot drive selector key(f8) to choose the boot drive.

This way I can reinstall/mess with my OS installations without breaking the other OS installation.
 
yeah but my other drive is fakeraid, so i dont wanna mess with booting off there. i had it working fine with jaunty RC1, but when installing the final version, this happened
 
During Jaunty install, just before you click "Install", it shows you the things it's going to do (partition drives, etc). Also gives you an option for "advanced" or something. Do that, then check where it's putting the boot loader. Make sure it's not overwriting the Vista boot loader. Same thing happened to me, and that solved it. If your hard drive is /dev/sda, then /dev/sda1 will be the first partition, /dev/sda2 will be the second partition, etc
 
yeah. first i installed GRUB to /dev/sdc2 (where ubuntu is), but then it just boots into windows, and cant boot into linux, or putting it in /dev/sdc seems to overwrite the bootloader of windows. Can u explain a little?
 
1) Restore Vista back to default (using your recovery disc or otherwise).

2) Boot the Ubuntu install disc, and go through the usual things like choosing location, partition options, etc.

3) Just before it begins the install process, it should present you with a window where it confirms the actions it is going to perform, and there is an "Advanced" option. You can change bootloader settings there. Basically, you have the option to choose where the bootloader will be stored. My hard drive is detected as /dev/sda, my Vista partition is /dev/sda1, and my Ubuntu partition is /dev/sda3. I choose /dev/sda as the location for the bootloader.
 
Very strange. Could you give us a breakdown of your hardware? Are the operating systems installed on the same drive? Are they SATA or IDE ? Have you tried all the various combinations of where to put your boot loader? Have you set up dual-boot before (possibly on a previous version on Ubuntu) ?

Because I've never had that issue, provided I didn't choose the Windows partition as the location for the bootloader.
 
Yeah. ok i have 2 sata drives in raid0 and a 500gb sata drive. I installed development version of jaunty and it worked 100%. now when i upgraded to final version, this happens. I have 2 60gb partitions, one NTFS, one ext4. NTFS is at the beginning, after a 1mb free space (i assume this is for GRUB, i didnt make it) and then ext4 and then data partition. windows is on the first partition, and linux on the 2nd.

What i did last time is disconnect my raid drives before installing ubuntu. im going to try to do this again now. Hopefully wont need to re-install windows again
 
Hmmm... That's a much more complicated setup than I'm running ;)

Good luck. Hopefully one of the other guys can help!
 
haha. ok i did it. and i worked :)
i disconnected the raid drives, and the advanced option now installed GRUB on hd0. it was previously sdc or sda or something. windows is working fine. and im about to check ubuntu. thanks :)
 
you don't need to reinstall windows, goto recovery console and run bootsect
you want to do the /mbr and /fixboot options.
Seems a bit strange your partitioning isn't showing up a linux swap.

IMO dual booting is a pain in the arse, sit all day booting between OS's is not my idea of fun but to each their own.
 
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eish i tried to repair windows so many ways. with the automated recovery, recover console bootret /fixmbr, bootsect /nt60 all, etc and nothing really worked. yeah dual booting is a pain, but i will mainly be using windows so i wont really be changing every day
 
Aqua_lung said:
Personally I've always been against dualbooting, it's should only be an option if you have one drive.

What I do is have 1 drives for each OS, when i install to one drive I unplug the power cable of the drive I want to avoid installing too, after installation I reattach the power cable then just use the bios boot drive selector key(f8) to choose the boot drive.

This way I can reinstall/mess with my OS installations without breaking the other OS installation.
Click to expand...

Why should anyone have to dismantle a case in order to load an alternative OS? My viewpoint is that if you are contemplating dualbooting, you are not an ordinary user and therefore have the compunction to try and understand how other things work.

Unless you are like the OP and use RAID, dualbooting is one of the easiest things to do. And I only say that because I have never tried RAID so can't express any opinion as to the ease or difficulty of RAID.
 
From the error it sounded like there was a grub setup error, ie. grub pointed to the wrong file and/or partition. Usually the linux distro's detects and configs the menu.lst file of grub correctly, but something seems to have gone wrong. Also I don't have any experiance with dual booting vista, who's bootloader is way different to the XP boot loader.

Aqua_lung: Disconnecting the windows driver results in a sure fire way of not messing up your windows drive. If you are sure about your partition to physical drive mapping you can just elect that grub installs it self to a specific drive, or even partition instead to the windows drive's MBR. For the different physical drive option you can then just opt to boot from the other drive upon restart (possible through a BIOS quick boot menu of sorts). For the different partition option, in win XP, you can copy the first 512B of the linux partition to the windows partition and point the ntloader(boot.ini) to that file (being the grub loader).
 
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