Ubuntu Installation :: Lost Windows Entry In Grub After Update
Jul 9, 2010
Ubuntu's update manager recently updated the Grub menu.lst file. It let me decide if I wanted to keep my old menu.lst or the new one. After deciding that I was fine with the new one, I found out that I can no longer boot into Windows 7. I had previously edited menu.lst so that Windows would be at the top of the list, however, I didn't notice that this had put it into the automagic update area, and I realize now that I should have just edited what the default number was instead of moving around the entries.
Anyways, I can no longer access my Windows 7 OS via Grub, and I was wondering what sort of fix I can have for this. I've tried running update-grub, but it hasn't fixed the problem. The Windows bootloader is on the first partition of the only hard drive, as far as I can remember.
I followed the instructions from this post to reorder my boot options. But somehow I was stupid enough not to copy the windows entry, as indicated (I was mainly following only terminal instructions and such).Now I have a grub menu without my Windows 7 entry, please tell me there is a way to restore it.
I am actually facing a vague problem here. I was previously running Windows XP and Ubuntu . Ubuntu was installed Windows XP The problem is
1. First I tried to do some disk partitioning. That ended up with some error.
2. Ignoring that, I went to install Windows 7 over Windows XP but I was not able to proceed with Windows 7 , because the partitions were corrupted.
3. So I used Ubuntu LIVE CD (Grub was lost at this point )and used 'testdisk' and recovered the partitions.
4. Now installed the Windows 7 successfully.
5. Now again I moved to Ubuntu Live CD to write the GRUB. After which I tried restarting
6. Now Ubuntu is booting perfectly as before. But the problem is with Windows
7. The GRUB loader instead of showing Windows 7, it shows Windows XP !!! . and there is no other entry for windows. When I tried opening it, it says "error, cant read file" and further inout moves back to the grub loader list again.
"How do I change the entry to Windows 7 from Windows XP and boot Windows7 successfully " I tried it a couple of times, same thing happens . So how to change the entry?
I currently dual boot and wish to know how to remove the Windows partition/drive while still allowing Ubuntu 9.04 to load safely as my main OS. I know how to restore windows partition by;
If MBR gets damaged boot from MS Windows Xp disc, Select "R" for "recovery console", select main windows installation drive (admin password usually nothing, just press enter) and type "FIXMBR" this will allow you to boot windows again, but Ubuntu partition will be unbootable and require installing ubuntu again to dual boot.
But this leaves Ubuntu partition Un-bootable as it removes the grub menu, how would I do the same for Ubuntu and make window partition un-bootable so I can remove it?
my own fault really,just dived in to do the update and did not back everything up. I have three disks in my machine one winxp for games , one was suse 11.2 and added lately one for ubuntu. added the ubuntu disk installed and this replaced the grub loader, still gave me all my previous options but does not look as nice as the suse one.so I did update on 11.2 and thought would give me the nice one back and still have all my entries. Er no. entry for win and 11.3 but no ubuntu.
When I try booting windows from grub, I get nothing but a black screen, and blinking cursor. I have succedeed in locating the issue - when I have updated from 9.10 to 10.04, grub asked where he was supposed to install itself - apparently, this does bad things to NTFS boot sectors.
I've tried the testdisk fix, that apparently solves the problem for most people, to no avail. I tried recovering through the Win7 disk too, and, eerily, that only succeded in killing the mbr too, forcing me to reinstall grub from the livecd.
sudo fdisk-l says this:
Code: Disco /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 byte 255 testine, 63 settori/tracce, 121601 cilindri Unit = cilindri di 16065 * 512 = 8225280 byte3
I dual-boot ubuntu 9.04 and windows 7. I recently reinstalled windows, and it wiped grub-legacy off of my MBR. Reinstalling grub shouldn't be tough, right, especially with clear instructions? Anyway, I can't get anywhere with the official instructions here: [URL]. The first issue is that the current live CD has no program "grub" in terminal. I dug up an old live cd, but I couldn't get anything with the directions:
Find where Grub is. If this gives a few different answers then you will need to find the correct one, perhaps by trial-and-error. find /boot/grub/stage1 That command didn't find anything, nor did some similar commands found on google.
So I'm really at a loss. What should I do? -Can I install Grub 2 on my MBR? Will that work with 9.04? -Can I access my 9.04 install, copy files to Windows, and then just format the partition and clean install 10.04?
I was getting ubuntu grub menu, and i was able to login to windows xp, windows server 2008 and ubuntu 10.10. Recently there was some problem with windows server 2008 and i had to reinstall it, once i did that i lost my grub menu. now i am getting plain windows menu with option of login into windows xp and windows 2008. So how can i restore the grub menu, so that i can login into all the three os from one point.
I was cleaning old kernels from Grub menu, all sorted except for a vista entry that i could not delete. Ran this line which I found,"sudo chmod -x /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober", to remove unwanted entries, now only the linux entry left in Grub menu, windows 7 entry gone. The vista entry was from an old install which is not there anymore. Running 10.10 at the moment which is dualbooted with win7.
I have just updated to 10.04 on my Dell Insperon 8200 laptop, and all seems well with Linux.My problem is that although it shows in Grub Windows XP will not load. I just get a blank screen with a flashing cursor.I have tried to grub-mkconfig and grub-update, both of which reported successful results.However on reboot I still get a blank screen for windows.This was not an issue with 9.04 and 9.10.so I don't think it is the machine.
I had a working dual boot Ubuntu 10 and Windows 7. Anyways long story short, I got it working again but have lost the boot option for windows 7. If i run fdisk -l, I get the following.
I installed gparted and can see that windows 7 is installed in dev/sda6. In another forum, i read that someone had to edit their menu.lst so i did with the following.
I have manually added an entry for Ubuntu in my grub menu, using Yast. But every time the kernel is updated, this entry disappears. On the other hand, the one for Windows, that was added during OpenSuse's installation, is still there. So how can I keep this entry for Ubuntu ?
Edit : when I save the menu configuration in Yast, I get the following message : Code: Connecting to deprecated signal QDBusConnectionInterface::serviceOwnerChanged(QString,QString,QString) kbuildsycoca4 running... kbuildsycoca4 running...
I have Recently downloaded Fedora 15.|64bit| & I Think its a very good distro. However I Realised Once My Pc Restarted My Windows 7 Was Removed from my boot entry. I am Not At All familar with Linux, Ive Read millions of forums trying to fix my problem but all has failed.Could someone show me how to add The OS Back or How To Burn A Bootable OS (Win7) Using This Distro Of Linux.
I got ubuntu 10.04 lucid lynx along with windows (dual boot) and using Grub. On my computer, I have my C:/ (programs) and D:/ (data). I've never used my D:/ before that day that I've lost my windows partition on my grub menu. I usually use my D:/ with windows. The first time I used my D:/ to store data with linux, I lost my windows option in my grub menu. I'm not sure what I did wrong but I do want to restore my windows option in my grub menu.
After "fdisk -l",
I checked in /boot/grub and there is no menu.lst to modify. how I can get back my windows option in 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 installed Windows Xp 64bit(in a partition called d:) with dual boot with Debian Wheezy. Installed first Windows Xp and after Debian Wheezy, but grub is not seeing Windows!
Look at my "fdisk -l". root@robgeek:/home/rob# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders, total 156301488 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xe274e274
With a bit of help from this forum I managed to install 10.04. The solution was to add i915.modeset=1 to the options when booting up from CD.Now I need to do the same in order to boot up from HD. I've opened /etc/default/grub and changed the relevant line to include the above option. But I need to run "update-grub" and it comes back with an error to the effect that it 'can't find a device for / (is /dev mounted?)Also, the boot menu only has ubuntu - no sign of windows in my intended dual-boot. What can I do?
I am running Ubuntu 10.10. Normally when I boot, I get the choice to run Ubuntu or the Windows loader, where I choose between 7 or XP. I have just noticed that when I boot now, I do not have the choice of going into windows. This has happened on two of my PC's just in the last few days. I assume one of the updates has overwritten the grub configuration file as I still get the grub menu but not the windows option. I have tried sudo update-grub but this did not solve the problem.
I have installed ubuntu 9.10 and everything was working fine. Just a minutes ago a window popped up telling me that a complete update couldn't be completed, and asked me to go on with a partial update. I did it and then a window popped up (I think it was debconf running) asking me if I wanted to delete phpmyadmin database configuration or if I wanted to keep it... seemed like the updater was removing quite a bunch of packages!
After that I was presented with a long list of packages to be removed (among them apache2, php5, linux headers, etc.) I thought it was going to remove them in order to reinstall them latter, so I let it go) but now there's no ubuntu entry in the grub menu, so I had to boot with windows! Right now I'm downloading ubuntu 9.10 livecd to give it a try...
My problem is this, I decided to try Pardus since I had the disk space available and learned that it never created a entry for Ubuntu 9.10 64-Bit. I have tried many different boot options and have only gotten it to show the first black and white bootsplash but never can continue to boot. Is there a option I am forgetting to add via Pardus's GRUB editor or is it something else?
I did a dual boot install of Ubuntu 9.10. After that, when I rebooted my Windows XP was gone? I did update-grub and still nothing. I popped in the GRUB Super boot Disk 2 and browsed around, I think i found it but it says "Error: Invalid Signature". Iv googled and havent found a solution to this yet.
I booted off a XP CD into the recovery console, it sees my Windows partition and lets me get into it and browse all my files. So I know its there. I then tried fixmbr then fixboot and now all it loads is my Recovery Partition. I booted up SuperGrubDisk again and same results, it just sees my Ubuntu. I reinstalled grub and back to square 1. Then I tried a checkdsk /r and tried it all over again. Nothin'.
I have some encrypted files on my drive using EFS....i guess it would be ok to loose them, but I put a lot of work into them..
I want to avoid kernel id in Grub entry. I have searched before and one poster (can't find it again) posted a very simple Fedora Grub entry that just pointed to Fedoara's menu.lst. which worked.
For Suse I use: title openSUSE 11.1 (on /dev/sda7) by symlinks root (hd0,6) kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda7 splash=silent showopts vga=0x31a initrd /boot/initrd savedefault boot
I nave tried: title Fedora root (hd0,4) rootnoverify (hd0,4) chainloader +1
Where Fedora is on sda5 but, doesn't work for some reason.
i have puppy 4.2.1 installed on my hdd and have frugal installed a older version inside the existing puppy and would like to add it to the existing GRUB menu
I installed Ext2fsd from windows XP because I needed access to a text file on my ubuntu install. However, it didn't work because the drive is ext4 and all it listed was the root folders (/home, /var etc..) nothing any deeper.
I closed the app and continued working in windows.
Today I went to start my computer and it loaded the grub-rescue> prompt. I immediately tried to run "help" to find out what happened, however, grub reported the command as unknown.
I then ls and got a partial listing of the partitions.
Code: (hd0) (hd0,5) (hd0,1) (fd0)
So what do I do? How do I recover my linux partition? If the partition is bad - then how is the bios able to find the grub-rescue> prompt?
I have just installed Debian and the installation went smooth (net installation). The last prompt was to specify if you want to be able to boot 3 different OS's using grub. I answered yes (I have Win7, Ubuntu and now wanted to install Debian for testing purposes). Is there any way I could manually add entry to grub for booting Debian, for instance from Ubuntu adding to menu.lst?
I successfully installed Fedora 11 from the DVD iso. At the end, the installation program prompts me to reboot the system. But when the boot loader appears after rebooting, there are only the old entries.
I have 2 IDE disks and one sata disk. The first IDE disk is hd0, the second IDE is hd1. The SATA disk is hd2. In the setup, I selected hd0 to install grub. Fedora 11 was installed on the SATA disk (hd2).[edit] I forgot to say, that Fedora 10 is on /dev/sda and Fedora 9 on /dev/sdb
I just installed Fedora 11 (I installed over the Fedora 10 installation I had already installed)..
-Before I would have Grub give the choice of Fedora 10 or Windows (Where Windows would load the Win Boot loader for my options of Windows 7 and Windows Vista)
-NOW: I have the same options.. But when i select Windows (It loads the Recovery partition) instead of the Windows Boot Loader...
Here is my fdisk -l
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 192 1536000 27 Unknown Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/sda2 192 5414 41943040 7 HPFS/NTFS Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary. code....
