Ubuntu

Ubuntu overwrites or deletes boot sector in XP and Vista

Asked by thol538

I have XP Home and Vista Home on my machine. Vista and XP are on a 120GB disk, and Ubuntu was installed on a 250GB disk. At reboot, grub initally showed Ubuntu and two windows OS. Only Ubuntu would boot. After turning off and on, only Ubuntu appeared in grub. I might mention that the same problem occoured with Freespire. Mandriva did not cause the same problem. I will probably drop Vista in the near furure, and operate with just Ubuntu and XP. For now, I am forced to boot XP with an external boot disk. I would really like to get the boot sector reinstalled if possible. Any assistance with all this will be much appericated. Additional info: Intel motherboard and CPU (Celeron 3GB) 2GB ram, 80GB USB HD.

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Juan C. Villa (juanqui) said : 		#1

It seems that Ubuntu did not recognize your windows installation and did not add an entry onto the bootloader's config file for booting. This problem shouldn't be very hard to fix.

Open a terminal window (Applications->Accessories->Terminal)
Type "sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst"

The file will seem very confusing, but it's not really that bad. It's very well commented. You will find a section with an example on how to add a bootloader entry for Windows. You will basically just uncomment the example and change the root entry to whatever matches ur setup. If you have only one hard drive then it will always be hd0, then the partition number of windows is going to be the next number. After you have configured it, try rebooting your machine and test your new bootloader entry.

I hope this works out for you,
Good Luck

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h w woodall (getwoody) said : 		#2

How do I remove ubuntu software from my harddrive?

Revision history for this message
h w woodall (getwoody) said : 		#3

How do I remove ubuntu software from my harddrive?

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