Booting in to windows XP

[ooagentbender]

I am reluctant to mess with my grub setup because I'm working on a school project right now and i was wondering if there was any way I could burn a cd that would let me boot with the hard drive in my comp containing windows.


God Bless

[dkeav]

ohhh fooey just edit the damn menu.lst :p

title = windows
chainloader +1
boot

throw that in there

[knute]

That or go to grubs command line and enter each command one at a time.

dkeav,

Don't you need a rootnoverify line in there as well?

[dkeav]

if windows is on the first partition of the first drive, no you dont need a rootnoverify, if it doesnt boot for some reason, then add it

or you can do as knute said and just use the grub command to boot windows, at the menu press the c key before it boots linux

grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> chainloader +1
grub> boot

should do it

[saikee]

If you want to boot only Windows you need a Grub unattached to a systems. That is usually in a floppy but you can burn it into a CD. This thread (http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=142409) gives a detailed description how to make one.

When you boot up the CD to a Grub prompt use the instructions given by dkeav of Post #4.

The following command may be of interest to you

geometry (hd0) <---- ask Grub to display the partiting scheme of disk (hd0)

The Windows partitions are those with partition type 6 (fat16), b or c (fat32) and 7 (NTFS).

[ooagentbender]

ok its on the second hard drive (/dev/hdb1) thats the windows partition. so for grub that would be hd(1,0) right?

thanks for the help boys.

[Parcival]

ok its on the second hard drive (/dev/hdb1) thats the windows partition. so for grub that would be hd(1,0) right?

That's correct.

[saikee]

The correct syntax is hdb1 in Linux = (hd1,0) in Grub

(hd1,0) means first partition of the second disk to Grub as this guy counts from 0.

[dkeav]

everything counts from zero, as zero is a quantity and is the first quantity in a range

[ooagentbender]

well I tried it but I think the MBR was originally on /dev/hdb before I installed ubuntu over gentoo. So if anyone has any suggestions Im all ears


heres what I tried

root (hd1,0) and also (hd1,1)
chainloader +1
rootnoverify both with and without
boot

when I did the root commadn it told me that if couldn't recognize the file system but the partition type was 0x7.

thanks all.

[saikee]

Type 0x7 is NTFS partition. Grub doesn't write on it and treat it as not recognised.

If you have made the Grub CD, ask Grub to show you the partitioning scheme using the "geometry" statement as I suggested in Post #5

Modern Grub don't need rootnoverify.

Generally

root (hdi,j) <---- instruct Grub that you are insterested in jth partition of disk i as the root of the system you want to boot. Grub reply what partition type it has found. Type 0x7 mean a NTFS partition was found there.

Chainloader +1 <----- instructed Grub to boot the boot loader in root (i,j) at the "+1! position. This instructs Grub to "cut" off its first 512 bytes and "paste" at the 513th bye of the Windows boot loader and load the combined code into memory. If nothing is reported then the task is accomplished by Grub.

boot <---- This the is green light to start the booting or less politely to tell Grub "you can now bugger off".

[ooagentbender]

tried that and it just hangs.. anyone have an idea or need more info about the partitions?

[saikee]

You can slip in a Live CD, click terminal and see the full partition table with "fdisk" or "cfdisk" program.

fdisk -l
is enough to show up every partition of every disk in any PC.