Want to boot from Vista, not Ubuntu

[BobDylanThomas]

Friend asked me to post this. He has tried numerous things to bypass Ubuntu and boot via Vista, without success. He has a DVD (IDE) Pioneer 115D, and yesterday he adjusted his bios to boot from that, using a Vista DVD disk. He has two Samsung hard drives, 500 GB each, eSata. Ubuntu 8.04 hardy heron installed on drive 1, with back up partition on drive 2. After booting with Vista disk in, it still loads the grub kernal and starts into Ubuntu. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[darkpaw]

You either need to add Vista to the grub OS selection or can try running the Vista boot repair off the setup DVD and it should reinstall the Windows loader instead of grub.

 

[SmokeRngs]

You either need to add Vista to the grub OS selection

This will give him the ability to boot either OS and which one has boot priority if nothing in the menu is user selected and the menu timeout has passed.

or can try running the Vista boot repair off the setup DVD and it should reinstall the Windows loader instead of grub.

This will completely bypass Grub making it impossible to boot into Linux until Grub is reinstalled.

The first option is obviously the best if he's wanting to run both OSes.

 

[MrF]

This will make it boot directly to Vista. But, if Vista and ubuntu are on the same drive, which you did not clarify, you will not be able to boot to ubuntu anymore.


Download gparted live CD and burn the iso image (using an iso burner) to a CD.
Boot to the CD.
Select the hard drive that contains Vista.
Right click on the Vista partition and choose "Manage Flags". Check "boot". Apply. Exit
Now, Vista is active.

Enter the BIOS and make sure the Hard drive containing Vista is the first on the boot priority list.
If it fails to boot, place the Vista DVD in and boot to it and perform a startup repair.

 

[BobDylanThomas]

Darkpaw....thanks for the suggestions. Can you dumb down those a little for us? I don't know if my friend will understand your suggestions but I know I do not, because of my ignorance.

 

[BobDylanThomas]

I did not see your replies before responding to Darkpaw. I will pass along all of these suggestions to my friend and then see where we go. Thank you all.

 

[heatlesssun]

One other thing to take a look at is EasyBCD. It's a nifty little utility and shoud handle this job nicely: http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

 

[djBon2112]

Does he actually use the Ubuntu partition? If so, this is the best bet.

These are the steps for what Darkpaw suggested.

1. Boot into Ubuntu and open a terminal.
2. Enter "ls /dev | grep sd" - That will list your hard drives and partitions. Your list will usually look something like this:

joshua@W01-Zeus:~$ ls /dev | grep sd
sda
sda1
sda2
sda3
sda5
sda6
sda7
sda8
sdb
sdb1
sdb2

95 times out of 100 /dev/sda is your first hard drive (i.e. the Ubuntu one) and sdb, sdc, etc. are other drives. Your second drive (the one with Vista) is probably /dev/sdb and /dev/sdb1 is its first partition. Make note of this.
3. Change that /dev/sdx to something GRUB knows. sda1 ends up being (hd0,0). sdb1 is (hd1,0). sdb2 is (hd1,1), etc.
4. Enter "sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst" to edit the GRUB bootloader options. Scroll to the bottom and add this:

 title		Windows Vista
 root		(hd1,0)  # assuming /dev/sdb1 is the Vista drive
 makeactive
 chainloader	+1

That adds a line for Vista in GRUB. To make it the default, go up a little bit more in the GRUB config file to the line that says:

default		0

Change that to the number of the line you just enetered (in a fully default GRUB config with Ubuntu, there are 3 existing lines, so the new one you just added is default 3).

That should work. Reboot to check if it starts Windows, if not boot back into Ubuntu and try again. I know my computer sometimes mixes sda and sdb up during boot (so hd0 is actually sdb). If you're having any trouble just give me a shout I'll give you a bit more of a hand.