Getting Debian To Play With XP/Vista/Longhorn

M

morpheus

Member
Thanks for this great utility which has made my life a lot easier! I used to use Partition Magic and Boot Magic with XP and Linux but the combo of EasyBCD and the Vista Boot Manager is a lot more powerful.

I have a new Core 2 Duo PC with the following config that I am trying to add Debian Linux to.

Disk 0: 200 gig SATA
Partitions:
XP (C: drive)
System recovery partition

Disk 1: 300 gig SATA (set as boot drive in BIOS)
Partitions:
Vista (I: drive)
Longhorn (L: according to Vista Disk Manager, but marked as E: drive in XP)
Debian (Etch beta3 for AMD64) with grub installed to that partition which was /dev/sdb7 according to debian)

This PC also has a media reader and DVD drive so D:, F:. G: H: and K: are also in use.

All of the Windows boot options work great and I can boot into XP/Vista/Longhorn fine. But I can't boot into Debian, and when I look at EasyBCD it wants to boot Debian from C: which is clearly on the wrong drive and partition. If I try changing the drive letter (e.g. I tried to set it to J:smile: EasyBCD sets it back to C:.

My EasyBCD config is below. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks again for a cool utility!

Morph

There are a total of 4 entries listed in the Vista Bootloader.
Bootloader TimeOut: 30 seconds.
Default OS: Microsoft Windows Server Code Name Longhorn

Entry #1

Name: Earlier Version of Windows
BCD ID: {ntldr}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \ntldr
Windows Directory:

Entry #2

Name: Microsoft Windows Server Code Name Longhorn
BCD ID: {default}
Drive: L:\
Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Windows Directory: \Windows

Entry #3

Name: Microsoft Windows Vista
BCD ID: {current}
Drive: I:\
Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Windows Directory: \Windows

Entry #4

Name: NST Linux Loader
BCD ID: {a4d1748b-5fbb-11db-8464-001676ca494a}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \NST\nst_grub.mbr
Windows Directory:
 
Hi Morpheus, and welcome to NeoSmart Technologies!

Glad to hear you liked our program, and hopefully we can sort this out soon.

This is a "known-issue" we recently found out about, it seems that EasyBCD isn't willing to boot Linux from anything other than sda/hda

I can help you get this problem fixed if you are willing, it'll take a bit of work though.

The drive C: bit is actually correct, if you look down a bit, you'll see it isn't looking for grub but rather for our Linux loader in C:\NST\, which then looks for grub itself.

You're going to need to reinstall Grub to the Vista drive (sdb) and the copy a bit of info so that the Vista bootloader can take advantage of it.

Boot from the Etch DVD/CD into the "recovery console" and run grub-install - let it save to the MBR of the second drive.
Restart.
Boot into Linux via GRUB.
From linux, open a shell/terminal and type this in
Code: 
dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=grub.mbr bs=512 count=1
then send me that file please.

I should be able to get it to boot then :smile:
 
Thanks for the quick reply.

I booted the Debian CD into the recovery console and installed GRUB to /dev/sdb, but when I reboot the system, the Vista bootloader still appears i.e. I can't boot into Linux to get to run a 'dd' command.

Did I miss something?
 
I think Vista wrote its bootsector to drive 0 as well, try installing GRUB /dev/sda.

Once you've booted into GRUB try running the command I gave you for /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1
 
Back
Top