Ubuntu Installation :: Remove An Old Vista Boot Loader?
Apr 17, 2010
I've just came across something rather strange. I've been having a problem with GRUB 2 and Windows as highlighted in this thread:[URL].. Often when I attempt to access my Windows partition from GRUB I will get the Windows failed to start error, but today I may have found something rather interesting that may help me solve my problem. Sorry if it looks like im double posting, but im asking something different.
Basically when Windows fails to boot it restarts and when I attempt to boot it again I usually get the Windows failed to start screen with the option to run Startup and Repair when I ran it earlier, I suddenly saw the Windows Vista Loading bar, which is rather impossible as im running Windows 7. But my laptop came pre-loaded with Windows Vista as well as a recovery partition with Windows Vista on it. I thought I'd removed them both completely but now seeing the Windows Vista Loading screen says otherwise. It looks like some part of the Vista loader remains and well could be the cause of my boot issues. So im wondering how can I go about fully removing the Windows Vista Boot loader?
I have had a strange experience in upgrading to Ubuntu 10.10 on a Dell Inspiron 1545 also running Vista. I was upgrading from a Ubuntu 8.04 that I thought would be worth reporting/sharing in case others have had a similar experience. last week I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 using the live cd. Everything seems have gone smoothly. I could log in and out of ubuntu. After logging into Vista and logging out, the next time I tried to start the machine, there was a 'segment offset error' with the boot loader and there was no way of rebooting into anything except to use the Ubuntu live CD and go to a terminal and reinstall the bootloader. The same thing happened after logging in to Vista- this seemed to mess with the boot loader. Logging in first time was not a problem.
Yesterday I started again, wiped out 10.10 and re-installed ubuntu but version 10.04. Logging in and out of Vista is so far ok and I have not had any problems. I do not have an obvious logical explanation to the sequence of events unless there is a problem with the boot loader in version 10.10.
I have just installed ubuntu with a USB key, I have Vista installed in drive C: and I created a partition (L: ) and installed Linux root (/ ) in that one.When there was the screen where I could choose the boot loader i left the default option instead of choosing Windows Vista Loaderand now I can't boot Vista anymore.
In grub i see a windows vista option, but that option brings me to a recovery partition and not to the real operative system. I know that vista is not broken because when I used wubi I was able to boot from the vista bootloader without any problems, but I never could boot vista from grub because it brought me to that recovery partition.I can access all my files on the disk from ubuntu, but I would like to be able to restore the vista boot loader and use again windows when I need it.Is there a way to restore vista's boot loader? I tried to do automatic startup repair from the vista recovery cd but it says that no problem could be found.
install fedora 11 on Vista I want to keep the windows boot loader and also install on a usb drive or a seperate partition that has 10GB free "install doesn't see partition's". Recently I installed ubuntu and had a major problem with booting, without having the usb drive connected I couldn't boot windows so uninstalled it. I'm trying to install now but install does'nt give me any option to select partitions from my drives one 320GB "portable, 3 partitions" and 80GB "main os 2 partitions one partition has 10GB free"
I've had to give up trying to install linux. It just won't work on my machine, a Presario 6370us that has been upgraded over the years such that it is not compatible with linux, apparently. (You can read my travails elsewhere on this board; thanks very much to all who tried to help.)
Now, how do I remove the GRUB boot loader from my system? I need the system to boot directly to Windows XP.
I can't start linux in any way, shape, or form, so I need to either edit GRUB inside the GRUB environment itself, or to do so from Windows.
Ideally, I'd like to remove GRUB entirely. Failing that, I'd like to edit the GRUB config file so that only Windows is an option. Failing that, I need to make Windows the default OS.
I have Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 dual-booted on my machine. grub was aautomaticlu installed as the primary loader. Soon i want to nuke my ubuntu partition but i know that will delete grub. Can i remove grub or at least make Windows boot loader default.
Im dual booting vista and ubuntu 10.10 when i start up i get the option to boot linux OR i can boot window recovery (loader) which works or i can choose windows xp which doesnt even work and im not sure why its there since i dont have xo installed and i never have on this pc. it doesnt say anything about vista anywhere.
My question is...is this a problem? it seems to work fine but i dont want to have problems later on.
I installed the live CD version of fedora (dual boot with vista) on my laptop. After I connected to the internet the updates downloaded and all went well. however when i restarted at the boot screen I found two instances of fedora such as
Fedora(2.6.27.9-159.fc10.i686) Fedora(2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686) Other
The "other" is vista. I am wondering if this is OK or whether I have two fedora. If so i would like to remove one of them to save disk space.
One thing I notice and hope someone here can steer me in the right direction. When I start up my computer I have the list of options to choose from, if I choose to boot into Win 7 I am the presented again with another boot menu from windows. I would like to remove the Windows boot loader.
I Dual-Booted (if im not mistaken is the term for installing two OS) Ubuntu 9.10 and Windows Vista. Using Ubuntu 9.10 as my primary OS and using Vista for some programming ( college stuffs ) Only a moment ago, i reformat/recovered my Vista and only i found out that, my GRUB loader has gone. I'm asking is there any way for me to install a GRUB loader using Vista?
I want to dualboot my HP laptop with Windows 7 and Ubuntu. The problem is that the harddrive had 4 primary partitions. So i had to delete the Recovery and HP TOOLS partions. I did that after creating my system recovry CDS. The "install alongside another operating system" option showed up. And i was really happy for about 1 minute until i discovered that it said Windows Vista loader! So now i have this:
sda 640GB harddrive sda1 Windows 7 loader sda2 Windows Vista loader
And when im trying to install a dualboot the Windows 7 loader dosent show up! It wants to install Vista loader but i dont have that operating system. I have read that 7 and Vista sometimes gets mixed up in GRUB can this be the case here? Is it safe for me to install Vista loader with Ubuntu 10.10?
I didnt know where to ask this question but if anyone could direct me I would appreciate it.I would love! to remove the fedora Boot image progress bar when I choose to run Fedora, Is it possible to have this removed and just show my the inner working's like it did with older linux distros? where it has the lovely
I have a laptop which was originally running Windows Vista, I attempted to install Windows XP on via USB since the laptop couldn't boot the install disk (this has turned out to be a bad disk drive. This fell flat on its back and wouldn't even finish the install (although not before formating the Vista install in to oblivion). Although I was extremely careful to leave the Vista recovery intact. So I managed to get Ubuntu 8.10 (XFCE if that makes any difference) installed over USB. I was wondering, Could I use the GRUB louder to boot into the recovery drive? Laptop is a Toshiba Equium L350D
I have been unable to locate an answer to the below.Just installed 10.10 server and noticed that during boot each time the Grub Menu pops up. I have to manually press a key on my keyboard each time to get through this menu. This is a big problem as this is going to be administered remotely. here is my /boot/grub/grub.cfg file
Code: # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE # # It is automatically generated by grub-mkconfig using templates[code].......
Now, It seems to me that with the settings above that menu should time out after a few seconds but it is not. I must press enter each time.how I can get this damn thing to timeout after a few seconds?
I just made my system unbootable... Here is what i did.. I have two sata HDDs
160 GB (Contained Windows 7) 500 GB
I copied entire 160 gb as an mirrored image to 500GB HDD using Acronis Disk Director. I deleted entire 160 GB HDD.. Removed the 500 GB HDD and kept it seperate.. Installed ClearOS Enterprise 5.2 Worked a little bit... The i wanted to delete ClearOS.. So i connected 500GB HDD and booted again in Acronis Disk director Formated the entire 160GB HDD.. Copied back the entire 160 from 500GB HDD.. Now my sytem refuses to boot... Just 4 letters "GRUB" appears on the screen... I tried booting using XP CD.. It gives a blue screen.. I tried Windows 7 CD.. It says unable to fix due to MBR problem..
I have a single hard-drive on a spare computer and I decided to try out Ubuntu on recommendation from a friend. I really like it now but at first I just dual-booted it, and now I want Vista gone. I know it's unnecessary to have just one OS but my hard-drive isn't particularly big and I'd prefer to have Ubuntu by itself. Can anyone tell me how to eliminate vista and leave Ubuntu as my sole operating system (I've all my files from computer on another computer so I don't have to worry about losing anything).
I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my PC running Vista Home Basic. I installed to run as a dual boot but now I can only boot into Ubuntu. I have tried to run the recovery disk for Vista and it errors out also..
I installed ubuntu using wubi and then I tried installing grub 2 but it failed. I need a way to reinstall the mbr sp it will load the windows 7 loader from the first partition.
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.
is it possible to use a Windows-based recovery partition on a dual-boot computer to overwrite the Ubuntu partition and remove the GRUB loader? For instance, if you booted up your computer, accessed the hidden recovery partition and used it to reset the computer to it's factory default settings, would that effectively remove the Ubuntu partition and the GRUB loader? Would a completely new installation of Windows overwrite/uninstall Ubuntu and GRUB automatically?
What is the Windows Vista (loader) when you start your computer and have to choose the ubuntu or the other operating system your running. There are some other chioces too like ubuntu safe mode. But whats the loader? Ive never tried to use it since i have no idea what it does.
HDD 1 (sda) with Windows XP installed on sda1 and four more partions.
HDD 2 (sdb) with three NTFS-Partitions (sdb1, 5 and 6) and Ubuntu 10.04 (sdb7) + Swap-Partition (sdb8).
I would like to boot Ubuntu using the Windows XP boot loader, i.e., having an entry there to choose Ubuntu and start my installation of Ubuntu 10.04. I have installed Ubuntu 10.04 on sdb7 and told the installer to install the grub2 boot loader to /dev/sdb (should it have been /dev/sdb7?). When using the boot selection option of my bios and choosing the second HDD Ubuntu starts without problems.
I used dd if=/dev/sdb of=bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1 to copy the mbr of my second HDD and copied the file bootsect.lnx to my c: drive. Then added C:ootsect.lnk = "Ubuntu Linux" to my Windows boot.ini. When rebooting my computer I get the option "Ubuntu Linux" in the XP boot loader. Choosing it I come to a black screen with a blinking white cursor. All I want to do is not use Grub 2 as my primary boot loader but instead leave my WinXP installation untouched and start Ubuntu from within WinXP boot loader. This has been working just fine with my old Ubuntu installation.
I have XP, Win7 Pro and F 11 installed. Before I installed F 11, Win 7 boot mgr was working fine. I then installed F 11 and I went to System/Admin/bootloader to edit it and it wouldn't bring up the boot loader. In the attachment was the error msg. Now my only option when I boot up is F 11.
I do not have access to the Win 7 DVD only the F 11 install disk since I am on a fishing trip and need to use Win 7. How can I repair to the grub boot loader to boot into Win 7?
I'm trying to install Fedora onto a computer that has Windows XP on the first of two SATA drives. Windows 7 is on the second drive.
I installed Fedora no problems on a 14 gig free space I created on the first drive and told it where and what my other OS's were. Fine so far. I didn't tell it to overwrite the MBR on the XP (first) drive. I took the second option which I "think" put the boot loader on the fedora partition.
All good - till I rebooted and I just saw my Windows 7 loader with my options for XP and Windows 7 but no Fedora.
So, if I overwrite the MBR on the first drive, will that mean I can't access my Windows 7 installation?
I have 3 hard drives and have Ubuntu installed on one (sdb), had windows vista installed in the other (sda) and use the other (sdc) as a back up/extra space. I just deleted the windows vista partition and formatted the hard drive (ext4) and now just use Ubuntu, however, in the grub boot, vista and recovery is still showing up. How can I clean the grub up and delete these entries. I've searched all over the place, googled like crazy and all I can find is how to get rid of grub or reinstall the MBR of vista (etc). One more thing, how can I permanently mount the new empty hard drive in Ubuntu so that I have access to it all the time w/out having to mount it.
I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 and everything was working fine. Last week I was away from home and when I returned, my wife told me that she cannot boot in Ubuntu. We have used dual boot for Windows Vista and Ubuntu. Now only Windows was working. So I created a LiveCD from Ubuntu website and tried to boot.
I can boot using LiveCD. Then I tried to install grub. I forgot exact commands I found online, but something to do with /dev/hda1) and now everything is messed up. It does not show boot menu (to select OS) at all. It only shows grub> window. I believe that the OS on the computer is alright, just the boot option is gone. I do not know how to get back the grub.
When booting from LiveCD,df /boot shows filesystem as aufs (no idea what it is). If I go through File browser, I can see the windows files and my Ubuntu installation. So I believe OS is okay, just not the boot loader.
Today I installed Ubuntu to C or win xp partition.
I can access the other partitions but when restarting I cannot see the boot loader. It directly boots to Ubuntu. My Win7 partition is still there , but I cannot boot into it.
