Dual Booting linux issue

[LoGiCaL__]

Ok, so i'm pretty sure I screwed things up. I installed linux on my D: drive and had windows reside on C: . Now every time I go to boot my pc it just goes directly to my linux os and there is no option to choose Windows. I share this pc so I would like to be able to have windows as an option for other users.

Is there any way to make windows boot as the primary os or make linux not the primary os? As of right now I can't even find my windows os at all. So at this point i'm pretty sure it's gone but figured I ask here in hopes of some fortunate luck. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[FunctionCreep]

So at this point i'm pretty sure it's gone but figured I ask here in hopes of some fortunate luck.

Unless you actually formatted your windows drive it should be intact. Have you tried to update the linux bootloader?(what distro & version are you using?) maybe that will do the trick and include your windows disk on the bootloader aswell. If you want to make sure about windows being safe you can simply disconnect the hard drive that has linux on it and it should boot windows.

P.S. If you installed ubuntu 10.04 I can tell you that grub2 (the bootloader) does not display the OS list automatically and you have to press the shift key a few times the moment you power on your pc. (that is before linux starts to load) <- Try this first.

Try this second -> If you do have ubuntu 10.04 (or any distro that has grub or grub2 as a bootloader) and your windows disk is not present on the list after you press shift, let linux load and open up a terminal and type:

Code: Select all

sudo update-grub

What that command will do is update the bootloader's entries in case the installer didn't catch your windows drive.

Let me know what happens and give more information of the distro you are using.

[LoGiCaL__]

I'm using fedora 13. Also the shift thing did not work. However, when I use the disk utility to view the drive, it shows the partition that windows is on. The drive I installed this linux on was my D:/ drive which I believe was for system recovery (never used it plus i have cd's). I'm not really so sure it was an actual physical drive now that I think about it.

After typing sudo update-grub in terminal I get this:

username is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

I then login as root and then run the same command and get

command not found

So this leaves me with updating the linux bootloader. I am pretty green when it comes to linux so I will have to research this and give it a go.

-- Sun May 30, 2010 3:48 pm --

Ok, I think I have it narrowed down to the grub.conf file. I'm just having a hard time finding out where to point it at for winXP. Fdisk -l doesn't produce any output. The hd that linux is on is hd(0,0).

[FunctionCreep]

Ok, I think I have it narrowed down to the grub.conf file. I'm just having a hard time finding out where to point it at for winXP. Fdisk -l doesn't produce any output. The hd that linux is on is hd(0,0).

hd(0,0) belongs to grub, linux probably resides on hd(0,1)

try adding the following to grub.conf (edit by being root)

Code: Select all

title Windows
root (hd0,2)
chainloader +1

Find out what linux has mapped the hard-disk of windows first. It could be for example /dev/hda2. Substitue the number on grub.conf. If the windows disk is /dev/hda6 add root (hd0,6). See how that works.

Edit: fdisk -l needs to be run as root aswell maybe that's why you didn't get any output.Try running it as root.

-- Sun May 30, 2010 11:15 pm --

Forgot to ask, does your system have 1 or 2 hard-drives?

[LoGiCaL__]

It only has one. However a D: drive was mapped and contained the System Rescue software. I installed it on that drive. So now when I edit the grub.conf file, when I go to load XP it gives me:

Error 13: Invalid or Unsupported executable format

Is it possible that grub is just not doing the correct thing or could something with Windows boot file be the issue?
I have gone hd0(0,0) to hd0(0,1) anything higher than that sas no partition exists.