EasyBCD not booting Linux

steve1961

Member
Hi there, hopefully someone can help me with this. My system has three sata drives with XP and a FAT32 data partition on the first drive, Ubuntu on the second drive, Debian on the first partition of the third drive, and Vista on the second primary partition of the third drive. Here's the output of fdisk -l:

Code:
Disk /dev/sda: 163.9 GB, 163928604672 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19929 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1       10443    83883366    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2           10444       19929    76196295    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5           10444       19929    76196263+   b  W95 FAT32

Disk /dev/sdb: 40.0 GB, 40060403712 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1        4665    37471581   83  Linux
/dev/sdb2            4666        4870     1646662+   5  Extended
/dev/sdb5            4666        4870     1646631   82  Linux swap / 
Solaris

Disk /dev/sdc: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 155061 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1   *           1       52014    26215024+  83  Linux
/dev/sdc2           52015       55207     1609272    5  Extended
/dev/sdc3           55208      155061    50326416    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdc5           52015       55207     1609240+  82  Linux swap / 
Solaris

The Vista boot manager is installed, as I understand it, on the XP partition, and it works well for booting XP or Vista. Debian and Ubuntu both have Grub installed to their root partitions rather than the mbr as I have been using the Acronis OS selector to boot all the systems. However, it seems a bit flaky as far as Vista is concerned so it would be a better solution to use Vista's boot mamager for everything.

So I installed easyBCD and attempted to point it at the Ubuntu partition (disk1 partition1). Here's the grub entry from menu.lst:

Code:
title           Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.20-14-generic
root            (hd1,0)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-14-generic 
root=UUID=ad16bbb6-c06d-4f8b-8260-f760049cd6d9 ro quiet splash
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.20-14-generic
quiet
savedefault

When selecting Ubuntu I just got a grub prompt and had to reboot to get back to the menu. So next I made a copy of Ubuntu's boot sector and saved it to the NST directory on the XP partition and named it nst_grub.mbr. There was already a file of that name there so I saved that to another directory for backup purposes first. This time I just got a message telling me the operating system file was corrupt. So I replaced the original file and was back to the original grub prompt.

I know I can install grub to the mbr of the first drive and use that as the main bootloader, and the Acronis bootloader is sort of working, so this isn't a disaster. However, I'd really like to get this working. Any advice appreciated.
 
Hello Steve,

Welcome to NeoSmart Technologies, and thanks for using EasyBCD.

Instead of using EasyBCD's NeoGrub feature, add a Linux entry in the Add/Remove Entries screen with drive 0 partition 1.

Does that work?
 
Back
Top