Installation :: GRUB On USB Drive - Boot Into Windows
May 6, 2010
I installed Ubuntu on a portable usb drive using a live CD. But now my computer NEEDS the USB plugged in in order to access the GRUB on it so I can boot into Windows from my hard drive. If I boot up my computer without the USB drive plugged in my computer gives me the prompt "Rescue grub" with the ability to type stuff in. I tried to use F12 on startup of my computer in order to tell it to boot using my hard drive (where my Windows 7 is installed) but still no luck.
If the USB drive is plugged in at start up, I get a neat little menu giving me a choice of booting into either Ubuntu, Windows 7, or the memory test. And all of that works fine. Basically, the problem is, I want to boot into Windows without needing that darn USB drive having to be plugged in when I start my computer.
I installed 11.04 after Windows 7. when the GRUB boot menu starts up there is an option for Win 7 boot but it will not boot windows. When that option is selected the screen changes colour for 2 seconds and then reverts to the GRUB menu. Ubuntu boots fine.I downloaded the Boot Info Script and ran it, the results are
Code: Boot Info Script 0.55 dated February 15th, 2010 ============================= Boot Info Summary: ==============================[code].....
I had a dual boot machine with fedora 12 and windows vista and I could use grub boot-loader to switch between two. Few days ago windows got corrupt and I have to reinstall it. I put windows 7 now and as usual it erased grub. So to reinstall I put the fedora 12 installation CD on and followed some usual setup steps. When I got the command line I issued the command "grub-install /dev/sda" (sda not hda because It showed bunch of sda, sda1..) but surprisingly it said grub command not found. I remember doing it before while it worked fine.
I had 9.10 installed and I did an upgrade to 10.04. However I cannot see anymore my Windows Vista partition with grub.. I have a Toshiba laptop Satellite p305.This is my boot script output:
Boot Info Script 0.55 dated February 15th, 2010
============================= Boot Info Summary: ==============================
=> Grub 2 is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda and looks on the same drive in [code].......
how to be able to add windows 7 to my grub menu or to even be able to boot to windows 7. I am currently unable to do it and my system just automatically goes straight to ubuntu. I've tried holding down SHIFT during startup and all that appears in my list is ubuntu entries and a memtest entry. My windows 7 files are still intact because I can see the drive through ubuntu and see all my files. I am trying to have Windows 7 on one hard disk that is 640GB and ubuntu on a second hard disk that is 160GB
I just set up a dual boot on a system with fedora 12 and XP. XP in on one hard drive (sda) and Fedora on a second hard drive (sdb).
I installed grub on the Fedora disk so as to not touch the windows disk at all.
Prior to installation, in the bios, I set the Fedora disk (sdb) first in the boot sequence, and then XP (sda) so that the grub loader would boot up by default. (If I set the windows drive first then the system bypasses grub and loads straight into windows.)
My system can now boot up into Fedora fine, but if I select windows from the grub loader menu I just get a blinking cursor - windows will not boot.What do I have to do so that grub can boot into XP?
I have an older Pentium 3 laptop, a toshiba portege 7140CT. It's one of those laptops designed to be light and easy on battery, so that means no CD drive and no floppy. You have to have the docking station to use optical media.... and I don't have it. I was given this machine for free some years back. I have a USB external DVD-RW drive, and what I want to do is configure GRUB to kickstart a CD/DVD boot from it if possible. obviously, being an old P3 laptop the BIOS has no concept of USB boot. is there a way to pull this off?
I have a dual boot machine windows xp & Ubuntu 10.04. I want to use Grub 2 to boot an Ubuntu 8.04 32bit live cd image off my hard drive. I put a copy of the 8.04 iso in a new directory /boot/iso. I added the following lines to my grub.cfg.
menuentry "Ubuntu Live 8.04 32bit" { loopback loop /boot/iso/ubuntu804.iso linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz boot=casper iso-scan/filename=/boot/iso/ubuntu804.iso noeject noprompt -- initrd (loop)/casper/initrd.lz }
I am setting up ubuntu on a new(ish) HP desktop and it has been pretty painful. My issues up until now are in this thread: [URL] I marked that one as solved and am starting a new one as the initial issue for starting that thread was indeed solved. Here is where I am at now: [URL] I've found that I can just type exit, sometimes, once sometimes 10 times, and ubuntu will eventually boot. My main concern is that the grub menu only appears intermittently at boot. If I hit ESC to specify a boot device, it will show up after I pick, but if I just turn the PC on, it seems to be hit or miss. Also, as an aside, when I do get the grub menu, it is version 1.9.xxxxx. Should I be using 2?
Once in a grub menu, I follow the instructions here: [URL] and that lets me fully boot without getting the above 'gave up waiting...'error. The only problem is that this seems to only be temporary. When I reboot and get to a grub menu again, hit e to edit, it's back to what it was before....
I've just installed a second hard drive in my laptop with windows 7 on one drive and Ubuntu on the other. I selected the side-by-side install in the Ubuntu install and let Ubuntu do the rest. Unfortunately Grub isn't seeing the windows install even after reconfiguring grub. However, the windows 7 drive is visible in Ubuntu and all the windows files are there intact.
Does anyone know how I can make grub see Windows 7 so I can boot into it?
First time poster and recent Ubuntu adopter. I recently installed 10.10 on my main HD alongside a separate windows (xp) partition (it worked perfectly). Then I decided to get fancy and installed 10.10 to a flash drive directly from a live cd. I attempted to boot from the flash drive, and got a black screen with a blinking underscore for about 10 minutes, then I forcefully rebooted. Now, whenever I attempt to boot at all from my main HD I get "error: no such device and a ton of misc numbers. And the flash drive will not allow me to boot from it. Currently, I'm working within the Live CD.
I have a few projects I need to complete with Dreamweaver inside XP, so recovering it completely would be nice.
Code: Boot Info Script 0.55 dated February 15th, 2010 ============================= Boot Info Summary: ============================== => Grub 2 is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda and looks on the same drive in partition #1 for (,msdos1)/boot/grub. => No boot loader is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdf
I had Windows XP installed on my PC then bought a new HDD, installed Windows 7 & Ubuntu 10.10 in dual boot, later I added the Windows XP HDD as an external USB then typed "update-grub".
At boot up the drive appears at the bottom of the GRUB menu but when I select Windows XP it gets as far as the XP splash screen, after a few seconds there is a flash of blue screen with some writing on it then the PC re-boots. Here is grub.cfg:
Code: # # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE # # It is automatically generated by grub-mkconfig using templates # from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub
I've set up a dual boot system with Debian and Windows 8, both installed on their own drive, with their own boot partition. I installed eveything in UEFI-Mode with fast- and secure boot turned off. Both installations are working, as I can access them by changing the boot priority in the Bios. What I cannot achieve is to let grub boot my windows installation.
This is the output of parted -l:
Code: Select allModel: ATA Samsung SSD 840 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 128GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: gpt
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 1049kB 512MB 511MB fat32 boot 2 512MB 111GB 111GB ext4 3 111GB 128GB 17,0GB linux-swap(v1)
[Code] ....
As you can see, my linux install is on sda, my windows install on sdc (sdb beeing a data disk). This is the entry I made in the 40_custom file in etc/grub.d:
I think this should be fine, but if I choose the windows entry wehen grub is booting, it says: error: no such partition. It's my first debian installation, and I am stuck here. Not too much of Linux experience in general.
I have Ubuntu/Vista dual boot desktop with Single HDD (200GB) that i cloned to an external USB HDD (320GB) using clonezilla. My intention is to use the external HDD as a backup to up running in case my 3 year old desktop HDD fails. To make sure the clone is good to use if need, i connected external HDD to USB port and tried boot from it but got "Error 18". I tried to Google got some infoDid a fdisk -lu and got the following.
Code: Disk /dev/sda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders, total 390721968 sectors
I have an old Dell Dimension 4500 that, until recently, had 2 hard drives. One drive is running Xubuntu Koala and the other was running XP. I had set up Xubuntu to run LVM.
After needing XP again for a small project I tried reinstalling XP, got disk errors, took the drive out to just have Xubuntu, and now when I boot I get "Error loading operating system".
I have tried restoring GRUB from a Live CD with no help. Everyplace I look on the net talks about restoring GRUB after installing Windows on another drive. I'm trying to get GRUB working again after removing the XP drive.
I'm new to linux systems and just installed Fedora 14 onto my Windows Vista laptop. I chose the shrink existing system option and then proceeded to install Fedora. The only problem is that when I choose Other in the Grub boot menu my Windows Vista goes straight to the recovery screen and does not boot. I don't want to do a point recovery. Is Vista not running because I shrunk it or because of some configuration that I did not add in the Grub files. How to solve this problem and get Vista running properly from the dual boot menu?
I have Win7 and ubuntu installed on the same PC. Win7 was installed first, after I installed GRUB from Ubuntu, Win7 is not listed as a second option to boot. FYI, On the same PC I had Win7 and Debian (before changing from Debian to Ubuntu) and GRUB from Debian was showing Win7 as second option for boot. Ubuntu was installed on the same partitions as Debian. (For Win7 I have 2 partitions one 100M-system reserved and one 30G; both on NTFS). I have: Linux ubuntu 2.6.28-18-generic #60-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 12 04:40:52 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux How to set /boot/grub/menu.ls file to add Win7! (I will do also a fresh install for Ubuntu 64Bit)
It would be nice to get a sticky thread up for dual boot installation issues. It seems like this is a very common problem with the upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04.
I was finally able to solve my issue dual booting 10.04 and Windows XP Home at this thread.
[URL]
I had to reinstall Grub2 and run update-grub.
Then I had to run Rescue on my XP disk. Once to the DOS command line I ran the following command:
C:Windows>fixboot c:
I rebooted and now all is well. I can boot to Ubuntu 10.04 or Windows XP from my Grub menu.
I have been phenomenally unlucky with Ubuntu as seen my my post history and decided to dual boot.
I set it all up with a clean install, when I tried to load Windows from Grub the computer restarted. After much headache I managed to set it up correctly (when it wouldn't load from Grub I booted from the Windows CD and clicked on "Repair computer" and it finally worked).
Now I am having the same problem as before--I think my installed all the updates from Update Manager and it included a grub one. Now I can't load Windows from the grub menu: It goes to the Starting Windows screen and then reboots my computer. If I do it again it gives me an error message and an option to perform "Startup repair". When I try to do Startup Repair, the computer reboots after a few loading screens.
So I tried what worked before and put in my Windows 7 CD, and clicked on Repair Computer. BUT NOW it gives me an error message somewhere along the lines of system restore is not compatible with my installation of Windows, and to insert a compatible recovery CD. This is the ONLY Windows CD I have (legitimate copy).
Over the course of this migration experiment I have installed and reinstalled both operating systems 7-10 times total. I'd rather not do it again. My poor laptop is probably wondering what the heck.
I can't stick with Ubuntu alone because my wireless doesn't work with it, my grad school files are not completely compatible with open source software, and I can't play the games I'd like to. So I must have the option to at least dual boot into Windows.
When selecting Windows it restarts the computer entirely to the Compaq screen, not just to the Grub menu, if that matters.
I have installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS-the Lucid Lynx on top of a Windows XP installation. The Windows partition started before I did this. Now, all I get is a flashing cursor when I tell GRUB to start the Windows XP partition.
I have tried reinstalling Ubuntu with no effect. I have tried repairing Windows using a Windows installation disk.
However, I can reach the files in the Windows partition just fine from Ubuntu.
i can't boot up my win XP after installing Ubuntu 10.10.
I decided to replace my Vista partition with Ubuntu 10.10 so i redo my partitions and split the current Vista partition to a swap and root partition and install Ubuntu 10.10
Everything went well and i got Ubuntu up and running. However, i realize that GRUB 2 didn't recognize my existing windows partition. I double-check on grub.cfg and see that the default os_prober didn't recognize my XP partition either.
After search on the internet for a while, i found many similar issue where most are fix when manually adding the entry yourself so i decided to add an entry 11_XP under /ect/grub.d/ for windows XP and confirm that the new entry are added to the update grub.cfg file before restarting
Code: ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/11_XP ### menuentry "Windows XP" { set root=(hd0,5) insmod chain drivemap -s (hd0)
I installed Ubuntu 11.04 64-Bit via Wubi but it seems that when I turn on my machine I first get the Windows Boot Loader, when I select Ubuntu from the list it then goes into GRUB with the option to select Ubuntu or Windows. Is there any way to change this so only GRUB is used?
11.04 installed on free space I had setup but it didn't install Grub2 for a dual boot (with Windows 7 Pro). It may have gotten confused with my disk setup. Drives and their groupings (Windows lingo):
- Windows 7 Pro on C-drive (appears to be sdb2), it is a SSD - The free space was setup on this SSD and Ubuntu is located on sdb5 (Linux) and sdb6 (swap space). - Applications stored on D-drive (RAID0 with 2 small SSDs using RST (Intel Rapid Storage Technology). - data on a RAID card using HDs in RAID0.
Small wonder it got confused, if that is the problem. I have a LiveCD I can use to boot, is that the best? What are the commands to install. Is there a better way?
I'm running Ubuntu 11.04 and Windows 7 on a Dell Inspiron. On boot I get the GRUB menu listing Ubuntu (+ old versions) and Windows 7. However, if I boot Windows 7 all is fine until I reboot. On this next boot GRUB is gone and Windows boots. Ubuntu is still there, I can get into using my live-cd and 'repair' GRUB. After that, on booting GRUB is back and fine (including Windows 7). Does any one have an idea how to fix the booting/GRUB thing more constructive?
I've been using Debian for a few years but always on dedicated boxes and/or VMs.
Finally decided to dual boot Debian and Windows on my main Desktop PC.
Installed as I normally would using, however this time using a seperate drive (one for the existing Windows 10 install and the other for Debian), Debian install detects that windows has an EFI partition and sticks an entry in there, which is fair enough, and everything working fine. Then I spent some time configuring all my software and set it all up just the way I like it. I've rebooted Debian a few times to check it's working correctly and it is.
The issue arrives when I reboot and load into Windows 10. It boots fine.
However after a further reboot GRUB no longer loads... and the machine just boots directly into Windows 10.
After doing some further digging into my EFI partition (and reinstalling various times) it would appear that after a reboot Windows 10 deletes the entry GRUB creates in my EFI partition after EVERY reboot.
Done some googling and most people advise turning off 'fast boot' in Windows as it locks certain partitions to facilitate the machine going into hibernation, only to find that it's always been turned off on my machine (I recall due to a driver issue with my graphics card this had to be turned off when I installed Windows 10).
I've found this article on the Ubuntu forums : [URL] .... however I've tried their steps and windows is still doing a hostile takeover of my EFI partion after a reboot!
Any way to stop Windows 10 from interfering with my EFI files after a reboot? (without doing the obvious thing and kill Windows off).
I've recently reinstalled all the os's on my computer, just now I'm going with ubuntu (general use) win xp (for flash, it doesnt play nice with 7 for some reason) and win 7 (for games). Everything is fine, but I can't get grub to boot me straight into either of the windows versions: Each option makes brings me to the windows bootloader, where I can choose between "Windows 7" and "Older version of windows". I want to go directly from grub to xp/7, without that extra menu. How do I get rid of it?
Using ubuntu 9.10. I snooped around and found a script to run that should give some helpful information:
