Triple boot woes.

S

SithToast

Member
Hey there!
I have had Vista installed for a while and decided last night that it would be a good idea to add another hard drive to my system. I took it out from another computer which had Windows 2003 installed on it, made it a slave and installed it.

Below is how my computer is setup now:
Master IDE = Vista
Slave IDE = Windows 2003, Ubuntu (newly installed drive)
SATA = No OS is installed on this drive.

Anywho, I deleted a few things and installed Ubuntu in the free space on the newly installed drive. After installing Ubuntu, grub threw up error 22 so I decided to reinstate vista's boot loader and use EasyBCD.

Now then, I went back into linux via my live cd and installed grub on the root partition (hd1,1 in linux). I came back to Windows and told EasyBCD to look there for grub. Upon rebooting, I got an error that had to do with NTLDR. So I switched the ubuntu entry to (1,2) in EasyBCD. When I rebooted this time, I got a black screen that said GRUB in the top right corner. Nothing else.

Okay, that's just one of my problems :smile: Here's the other one, it has to do with Windows.

I added Windows 2003 to EasyBCD under drive G: since that is the drive letter my 2003 install shows up as in Vista. I go to boot into that and it tells me that ntdetect failed and that my boot.ini file is bad.

Here is my boot.ini file for reference:
Code: 
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows Server 2003, Standard" /noexecute=optout /fastdetect

I'm guessing that I have to somehow change this to reflect that it is on drive G: instead of C: like it was in the other computer. :confused:

If you guys could help me achieve triple boot bliss, I would appreciate it :3
Thanks!
 
Still nothing :/
Invalid Boot.ini file
Booting from C:/Windows instead
NTDETECT failed

pressing enter will bring me back to the boot loader.

I tried reinstalling grub with that guide last night. I'm still having issues with it.
 
ah..
You have to copy boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com to the boot drive - which in your case is the vista one. it can't find boot.ini, so it uses its own (invalid) copy.
 
Well, somehow I got windows xp working with easybcd (i deleted windows 2003). I didn't have to copy over the ntldr files either. :confused: Weird, eh?

I'm still having that problem with linux though.
I recently installed that again, and made sure when I installed it from the live cd I stuck the bootloader on the new linux partition (1,3).
However, I still get a black screen with the word grub and a flashing text entry thing in the top left corner. Nothing more, nothing less.
 
try booting to a live cd or into linux (via a boot disk) and run the following command
Code: 
grub-install --recheck '(hd0,1)'
as a super user and replacing 0,1 with the right numbers.
 
Computer Guru said:
try booting to a live cd or into linux (via a boot disk) and run the following command
Code: 
grub-install --recheck '(hd0,1)'
as a super user and replacing 0,1 with the right numbers.
Click to expand...
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo grub-install --recheck '(hd1,3)'
Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.
Could not find device for /boot: Not found or not a block device.

I made sure the drive with my boot files was mounted before hand as well.

However, when I go to the grub shell and type in find /boot/grub/stage1 it'll tell me that it found it on (hd1,3)

How weird is that?
 
I downloaded a grub.mbr file you posted in another topic and put that in my directory before installing 1.6.

That shouldn't matter right?
 
Computer Guru said:
Before you do that, try
Code: 
grub-install --recheck '(hd1,3)'
instead.
Click to expand...
I did that already check the last post on the first page

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo grub-install --recheck '(hd1,3)'
Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.
Could not find device for /boot: Not found or not a block device.

I made sure the drive with my boot files was mounted before hand as well.

However, when I go to the grub shell and type in find /boot/grub/stage1 it'll tell me that it found it on (hd1,3)

How weird is that?
 
After following that guide you gave me...

root@ubuntu:/# grub-install --recheck '(hd1,3)'
Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.
Installation finished. No error reported.
This is the contents of the device map /boot/grub/device.map.
Check if this is correct or not. If any of the lines is incorrect,
fix it and re-run the script `grub-install'.

(fd0) /dev/fd0
(hd0) /dev/hda
(hd1) /dev/hdb
(hd2) /dev/sda

Woo! Alright! Now I can see grub, but now it throws up error 22 after selecting ubuntu. No such partition.
 
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT!!!!!!

That's it, now you just have to modiy your menu.lst to point to the right partitions!
Awesome :grinning:
 
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