Dual Booting Vista With Linux - How to go back?


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Hello All,

I have a situation where I currently have Vista Home Premium installed with Ubuntu 7.10. I am currently using the GRUB bootloader. I'd like to wipe the Ubuntu partition and dedicate this machine to Vista, but I am struggling to get rid of GRUB.

I want to begin to use the Vista boot loader before I wipe the Ubuntu partition, but if I try to do a repair, my Vista installation cannot be found. What gives? If it cannot be found now, then what are the guarantees that it will be found after I remove my Ubuntu installation?

Has anyone seen this before? If so is it normal behavior? Maybe I have to wipe my Ubuntu partition before my Vista installation will be seen by the repair/recovery console??

Any help/guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Dan

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Get hold of a boot cd (something like Hirens) and use one of the disk partitioning utilities (or use linux if you can boot into it) and set your Vista partition as the 'Active Partition' now reboot and see if Vista bootloader appears, if not boot off the Vista CD and do a repair - once the partition is marked active the installer should find it.

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The command you want to restore the vista bootloader is bootsect

Boot your Vista CD/DVD get to a command prompt an use it to restore the vista bootloader

http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista...3.mspx?mfr=true

Bootsect Command-Line Options

Bootsect.exe updates the master boot code for hard disk partitions to switch between BOOTMGR and NTLDR. You can use this tool to restore the boot sector on your computer. This tool replaces FixFAT and FixNTFS.

Here this article is basically the same thing -- your vista no longer boots because of a different bootloader/manger was installed. Just they use XP in this example.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919529

Windows Vista no longer starts after you install an earlier version of the Windows operating system in a dual-boot configuration

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Hi Everyone,

Thanks for the quick responses. VistaBootPro is not free, so I'm going to hold off on that option, and the problem that I'm having is that I cannot do a repair to fix the boot sector.

BudMan, I booted into the recovery console (repair option on Vista CD) and performed the following command successfully:

bootsect.exe /nt60 C:

However, when I reboot, GRUB still comes up. What am I doing wrong??

Thanks,

Dan

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Shoot - thanks OPaul. I only saw the option to purchase when I googled. Must have mucked something up. Let me try this now.

Unfortunately VistaBootPro didn't work. It just throws an error message stating the following:

"VistaBootPro has detected that your BCD registry is either missing or corrupt. It is recommended that you fix the problem in order to supress this message on further uses."

Thanks anyway...

DAn

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Did you look into the link I gave about dual boot issues?? Past the bootsect command?

It talks about using BCDedit to create entries.. As suggested sounds like you have an issue with your BCD info.

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Thanks everyone -- I'll try to add an entry using bcdedit and see what happens...

Geez, no luck at all today. When I try to use bcdedit, it says:

The boot configuration data store could not be opened.

The system cannot find the file specified.

I think this is pretty much what I knew before - my BCD data store is gone. I thought that since I got a 'success' back when I ran "bootsect.exe /nt60 C:" that it was re-created, but I guess not...

I'll keep thumbing through these articles but I'm open to any other ideas.

Thanks!

Dan

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Hey Everyone -

Problem solved. All I needed to do was copy bootmgr.exe from the Vista disk back into %systemroot% and then boom - I was greeted with the vista boot loader upon my next reboot. It gave me some errors, so I had to boot back to the disk and perform a 'startup repair', but now I'm back in business.

I've deleted the Ubuntu partition and all is well.

Thanks for all of your help!

Dan

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An why would bootmgr.exe have not been in your systemroot?? Grub sure did not remove that file from your NTFS drive, etc.

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An why would bootmgr.exe have not been in your systemroot?? Grub sure did not remove that file from your NTFS drive, etc.

It is *precisely* because of this sort of behavior by GRUB that I like Wubi (uses a nested filesystem to install Ubuntu or a variation thereof inside an existing XP or Vista partition; works with either Feisty Fawn ot Gutsy Gibbon).

Try it yourself here: http://wubi-installer.org

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It is *precisely* because of this sort of behavior by GRUB that I like Wubi (uses a nested filesystem to install Ubuntu or a variation thereof inside an existing XP or Vista partition; works with either Feisty Fawn ot Gutsy Gibbon).

Try it yourself here: http://wubi-installer.org

Re-read BudMan's statement. GRUB did not erase bootmgr.exe

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Try booting Vista from your Vista DVD, and get to the command line. Type in bootrec.exe /fixmbr this should over-write grub in the MBR with the Vista bootloader, and hence boot straight to Vista rather thang showing grub. It worked for me.

Or you could edit the grub file from your linux install, to set Vista as the default boot OS.

Open a terminal and CD to /boot/grub

sudo gedit grub.conf

and edit the file (not sure of the exact syntax) so that Vista is the first boot option.

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