Dual Boot Windows 7 Loader and Ubuntu with Ubuntu GRUB menu.lst

Discussion in 'Windows 7' started by liamria.z02, Sep 22, 2009.

  1. liamria.z02

    liamria.z02 MDL Novice

    Sep 22, 2009
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    I just want to share how I got this to work. Normally, when you try to find anything regarding dual boot with Ubuntu (Linux) installed first, you get the standard solution like:

    edit menu.lst

    title Windows
    root (hd0,0)
    makeactive
    chainloader +1

    In my case it do not work. I do not know how the Windows 7 Loader works, but

    First of all, the root (hd0,0) and makeactive command (or both, I am not sure) set the boot drive back to the windows drive, so the Ubuntu start menu never appeared again. In order to set it back I could simply start Ubuntu with the Ubuntu Live CD (=installation CD) and re-set the boot drive via the Partition Manager GParted (for me much easier than via the grub commands), but you do not want to do that everytime you have started Windows 7 instead of Ubuntu

    Secondly, the chainloader +1 always loaded Windows without the activation hack.

    So, I played around a bit and found the following entries that worked for me:

    This is my partition set up:

    HTML:
    sudo fdisk -l
    
       Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
    /dev/sda1               1          13      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS
    /dev/sda2              13       18236   146376704    7  HPFS/NTFS
    /dev/sda3   *       18237      118562   805868595   83  Linux
    /dev/sda4          118563      121601    24410767+   5  Extended
    /dev/sda5          118563      121601    24410736   82  Linux swap / Solaris
    
    
    
    That is the final entry in menu.lst

    ### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST
    title Windows 7
    rootnoverify (hd0,0)
    chainloader +2

    That's it. Feel free to contribute. Maybe someone with a bit more knowledge can explain, why the entries have to be like that. Especially the chainloader +2 should be explained.