Dear Neosmart,
I spent 3+ hours trying to get Ubuntu 9.04 to dual boot with Vista. In the end, the only thing that worked was to copy grub's menu.lst to neogrub's c:\nst\menu.lst, on advice from the itecsoftware website.
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The patient: A brand new refurbed Dell Dimension XPS 630i with Three SATA drives: 1 and were 2 RAID mirror for Vista, and disk 3 was /dev/sdc, ubuntu 9.04.
I tried following all the easybcd instructions and rebooted. Linuxy words flashed for a fraction of a second on the screen... I got dumped into Dell's diagnostic thing... i.e. it failed to boot linux, even a little bit.
I tried playing with 'neogrub', it just dumped me into 'grub4dos' > prompt. not too helpful.
I tried the 'bcdedit by hand' instructions found elsewhere, to use vista's command prompt to bcdedit and {LinuxID} device boot blah blah blah. It froze at GRUB when booting.
In between all of this, i tried reinstalling grub many times, resetting things in grub, following various tips and hints, etc.
Nothing.
I tried the beta version of easbycd. Still didn't work.
In the end, I found this:
Dual Boot Ubuntu 9.04 and Vista | Linux, Open Source and Web 2.0 from itecsoftware.com
...which says 'copy your menu.lst from grub into c:\nst\menu.lst', and use neogrub.
I did this, and, finally, thank god, it worked.
Oddities:
1. I unpugged a SATA cable from a SATA DVDROM drive and had to use it for the /dev/sdc disk... that along with RAID somehow this seems to have confused windows and/or linux and/or grub and/or easybcd about the numbering of disks.
2. Copying the menu.lst, well, it doesnt mention the whole thing about linux/windows crlf end of line problems... so when you hit 'configure' from easybcd, it opens notepad.exe, which of course, displays gobbldygook from your menu.lst if you copied it right from linux.
What 'copy' really means is to copy/paste the menu.lst file using ctrl-c and ctrl-v, after opening the original with wordpad.exe, and the c:\nst version with 'configure' from easybcd, as wordpad will repair crlf problems.
----
Some humble opinions.
1. Easybcd should completely drop all 'extra utilities' until its basic functionality is flawless, and includes copious amounts of debugging and error messages and diagnostic tools
2. Easybcd's neogrub setup should include the ability to automatically pull /boot/grub/menu.lst files for grub off of linux partitions, and fix the crlf.
3. If neogrub is more reliable and easy to use than the standard linux setup, then perhaps it should become the standard..
4. Easybcd, in the end, worked!
thank you
I spent 3+ hours trying to get Ubuntu 9.04 to dual boot with Vista. In the end, the only thing that worked was to copy grub's menu.lst to neogrub's c:\nst\menu.lst, on advice from the itecsoftware website.
---
The patient: A brand new refurbed Dell Dimension XPS 630i with Three SATA drives: 1 and were 2 RAID mirror for Vista, and disk 3 was /dev/sdc, ubuntu 9.04.
I tried following all the easybcd instructions and rebooted. Linuxy words flashed for a fraction of a second on the screen... I got dumped into Dell's diagnostic thing... i.e. it failed to boot linux, even a little bit.
I tried playing with 'neogrub', it just dumped me into 'grub4dos' > prompt. not too helpful.
I tried the 'bcdedit by hand' instructions found elsewhere, to use vista's command prompt to bcdedit and {LinuxID} device boot blah blah blah. It froze at GRUB when booting.
In between all of this, i tried reinstalling grub many times, resetting things in grub, following various tips and hints, etc.
Nothing.
I tried the beta version of easbycd. Still didn't work.
In the end, I found this:
Dual Boot Ubuntu 9.04 and Vista | Linux, Open Source and Web 2.0 from itecsoftware.com
...which says 'copy your menu.lst from grub into c:\nst\menu.lst', and use neogrub.
I did this, and, finally, thank god, it worked.
Oddities:
1. I unpugged a SATA cable from a SATA DVDROM drive and had to use it for the /dev/sdc disk... that along with RAID somehow this seems to have confused windows and/or linux and/or grub and/or easybcd about the numbering of disks.
2. Copying the menu.lst, well, it doesnt mention the whole thing about linux/windows crlf end of line problems... so when you hit 'configure' from easybcd, it opens notepad.exe, which of course, displays gobbldygook from your menu.lst if you copied it right from linux.
What 'copy' really means is to copy/paste the menu.lst file using ctrl-c and ctrl-v, after opening the original with wordpad.exe, and the c:\nst version with 'configure' from easybcd, as wordpad will repair crlf problems.
----
Some humble opinions.
1. Easybcd should completely drop all 'extra utilities' until its basic functionality is flawless, and includes copious amounts of debugging and error messages and diagnostic tools
2. Easybcd's neogrub setup should include the ability to automatically pull /boot/grub/menu.lst files for grub off of linux partitions, and fix the crlf.
3. If neogrub is more reliable and easy to use than the standard linux setup, then perhaps it should become the standard..
4. Easybcd, in the end, worked!
thank you
Last edited:
