Windows Vista boot help needed

[Lord Alpha]

Okay, let me explain what's going on.

I have a triple-boot system... A Windows Vista partition, a Windows XP partition and a Linux partition.

I recently reformatted and reinstalled my Windows XP partition and XP overrode the boot sector and installed only Windows XP into the boot sector

So now I need to get back into Windows Vista.

I pop in my installer disc and let it "repair" my boot sector.

It repairs the boot sector the same way Windows XP did - it completely ignored the fact that Windows XP was installed and made Windows Vista the only OS I could load.

When I first set up Windows Vista I had a menu come up that let me choose the Windows OS to use.

I'm trying to get this menu back. How do I do that?

Here's the output of BCDEdit.exe

Code: Select all

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier              {bootmgr}
device                  partition=D:
default                 {current}
displayorder            {current}
timeout                 30

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier              {current}
device                  partition=C:
path                    \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description             Windows Vista (TM) Ultimate (recovered)
osdevice                partition=C:
systemroot              \Windows
resumeobject            {81678508-bc67-11dc-8573-806e6f6e6963}
numproc                 2
detecthal               No
usefirmwarepcisettings  No

The top entry is my WinXP partition

[paulguy]

Just install GRUB in your boot sector and have it boot the windows partitions.
for example, change the roots based on how your partitions and things are set up. This is NOT a complete menu.lst file.

Code: Select all

title Linux
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-6.66 root=/dev/sdb1 ro
initrd /initrd-6.66

title Windows XP
root (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1

title Windows Vista
root (hd0,2)
makeactive
chainloader +1

That does pretty much what windows's MBR bootloader does, but this gives you an option.

[pagefault]

I have bad stories about GRUB and RAID drives.

[funkyass]

its a good idea to have a drive separate from a raid, for swap and booting purposes.

[pagefault]

Unfortunately ubuntu doesn't care and writes to whatever drive it feels like :/

[casualsax3]

Unfortunately ubuntu doesn't care and writes to whatever drive it feels like :/

Perhaps in the visual installer, though I recall selecting the drive... In any event text mode will have no trouble handling that.

[pagefault]

Well I can install it but I don't know how to stop it from trying to write to my raid partition...

Also do you know if the IC8H is compatible with linux because that is my RAID controller.

[casualsax3]

Depends on the distro. ICH8 is supported by Debian Etch, so Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10 will work, along with all of the CentOS blends and probably FC6+. What ICH8 specifically - ICH8r?