multiboot problems

[Arch Parsons]

Hello,

I installed XP/Vista/Win7 in that order and had a successful triple boot system. Then I downloaded a really devastating package of viruses in XP that weren't detected until they were released. The result was that I had to reinstall XP which caused me to lose access to Vista and Win7. Next I installed Linux Mint 7 which successfully listed itself and XP and two other Vista listings both of which failed to load either the Vista or the Win7. Finally, I did a repair on Vista and discovered after I got into it that there were other problems. so I decided to format that partition and reinstall Vista. This fixed the Vista problems but now the new boot loader, although it lists Windows (earlier version)/Windows Vista and Windows 7, does not successfully load either. Of course Linux is gone as well. My next plan of attack is to try to repair Windows 7, as that's what it tells me to do. Is there an easier way? What about getting XP back. Any help with using EasyBCD would be appreciated as well, as I haven't had too much success with that either. I can restore XP with EasyBCD but then the computer boots directly into XP. Any help would be much appreciated as I've been doing installations for the past three days and am becoming somewhat nauseated.

[Singh400]

EasyBCD is defintely the answer here. You will need to add the other OS'es manually in the EasyBCD UI. But to be honest, it sounds like thoe viruses (virii?) wrecked some havoc on your system. There is no way to know the full damage situation. I would save what data I could, and nuke & re-install.

[Arch Parsons]

Thanks for the reply. You may be right. I had to reinstall all three operating systems. Thankfully Windows 7 came to the rescue and did restore all three boot options. One thing I've learned from this, and that is to save all personal photos and videos directly to dvd's with backups to a partition that does not have an operating system on it. I did lose some videos and pictures (unnecessarily because I forgot to copy them to another partition) but nothing really important. Being that I like Linux Mint and that's still on there - just not accessible, I would like to get a functional Grub menu to include Mint with the three Windows OS's. I've had a lot of success like this with Mint 7 before, but I still don't know if there is a way to get it to scan the partitions on my drive and overwrite the MBR without having to reinstall the whole package. The worst thing is I don't know how to backup the bootloader and restore it if Mint's Grub doesn't fully work. Can you point me to a source that explains how to backup and restore (if necessary) a Windows mutliboot loader?

[Edit: One more thing I learned is to do most of my work on the most recent OS - Win7. That way I only have one OS to reinstall.]

  On 06/02/2010 at 22:21, Singh400 said:

EasyBCD is defintely the answer here. You will need to add the other OS'es manually in the EasyBCD UI. But to be honest, it sounds like thoe viruses (virii?) wrecked some havoc on your system. There is no way to know the full damage situation. I would save what data I could, and nuke & re-install.

[Computer Guru]

Download and use EasyBCD 2.0 Beta and from the "Add/Remove Entries" section add a GRUB2 entry. You may need to tick the little checkbox for it to work.

Good luck.