Dual Boot Vista/Fedora9 - Vista not booting

[agb81]

I started out with Vista, shrunk the volume to create a partition for Fedora. I installed fedora on the new partition but I'm not seeing an option to boot Vista anymore. I've restarted numerous times and it always goes straight to fedora. How do I get it to show an option to boot windows?

Thanks in advance.

[stoat]

Hello agb81,

Are you sure about that? Fedora is well-known for being good about adding an existing MS system to its menu. Reboot and press any key during the Fedora splash screen countdown. See the Fedora GRUB menu. Look for a choice named "Other" and choose it for booting. You might get Vista.

[agb81]

Hi stoat,
Thanks for the suggestion, but when I choose 'Other' I get the following error:

rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

BOOTMGR is missing


Does that mean it's trying to get to Vista?

[stoat]

I think it means that (hd0,1) is the wrong partition for Vista (or its boot loader files). Some ideas...

Try to figure out if that is true and, if so, which one it really is. In Fedora, start a terminal and run these commands to try and figure out which partition is Vista...

su
/sbin/fdisk -l

Look for an NTFS partition of the appropriate size for your Vista partition. If you need help studying the fdisk report, come back and post it here. If you discover that the likely Vista partition is actually, say the first partition of the first drive, then open the grub.conf for editing...

su
gedit /boot/grub/grub.conf

Then change the numbers in that rootnoverify line of the Vista section to this for that example...

title Vista
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

Save grub.conf and try again.

You can also guess at partitions in the Vista section of the grub.conf. It does no harm to guess there. Don't guess anywhere else in the grub.conf, however.

Or finally, just post the results of these...

su
/sbin/fdisk -l
cat /boot/grub/grub.conf

[agb81]

You're awesome!!!!!! Editing grub.conf is what I needed to do. Thanks stoat.

One more minor issue now: I'd rather it default to Vista unless I specify otherwise so would I need to just move Vista to the top of the listing in grub.conf?

[stoat]

You can either do that, which also has the effect of re-ordering the items in the GRUB menu that is presented at boot time. Or, you can just change the value for the default=0 command line in the grub.conf. That latter thing is easier to do and does not re-order the items in the GRUB menu. It just moves the highlight down to the item you changed the default to and then boots it when the countdown ends. I recommend leaving Vista at the bottom and changing the default value. You can also increase or decrease the countdown by changing the value of the timeout=30 command line. You can make the menu appear at every boot without pressing a key by typing a # character at the beginning of the hiddenmenu command. It's not a bad idea to keep a backup copy of the grub.conf somewhere in /home to help in recovering from a big mistake editing the working grub.conf.

[agb81]

Cool, thanks stoat. I'm new to linux so this is a great help.