my dual boot (Ubuntu/win2k) issue

Rollo Tamasi

I have had Ubuntu, latest release, installed on my pc for a while and decided to put win2k on it today as a dual system. I had a parition on my original system and i installed win2k on the free parition space. I formated that parition using NTFS and continued on with the installl.

Win2k is installed fine but when the pc boots up it doesn't give me the option to boot into Ubuntu. Any ideas as to what to do to reslove this issue.

If i need to provide more info then fire away with the questions.

311

Theres a file called boot.ini in the root directory of where windows is that gives you this option ,
I thought if you had microsoft on a machine ,it must be installed first before unix

I am only using unix since yesterday ,but I have XP and Ubuntu on the same machine

I'm not sure how the boot.ini works

Sorry ,thats all I know about it.

philologos

yeah generally unix must be installed first, I thought you could skip to step install GRUB bootloader on the Ubuntu install CD to fix that

Steveire

So I'm guessing you are not booting into a grub menu then?
Sound like windows installed its own boot manager during the installation.

If your ubuntu CD is a live one, look into booting from that and running 'grub-install' or something. Look it up first. That should find your ubuntu and windows operating systems, and install itself so that you get the choice on boot up.

Rollo Tamasi

yeah, i have a live cd of ubuntu, i'll give that a blast.

Tobias Greeshman

Alternatively you can use the Windows 2000 boot manager to boot into Ubuntu.

If you can boot into Linux with a boot floppy or alternatively with the CD.

open up a terminal
put a floppy in the drive
mount it

mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

Then copy the 1st 512 bytes of the main boot partition onto a file on the floppy (use / partition if /boot is not on a separate partition, i'll assume it's /dev/hda1 on your pc, but could be different).

dd count=1 bs=512 if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/floppy/boot.lnx

Unmount the floppy

umount /dev/fd0

Reboot into Windows, copy the boot.lnx file into the C:\ drive

Unhide all system files in explorer (in Folder settings)
Edit a file called "boot.ini"
Locate a section called [Operating Systems]
Underneath this, there should be a line with something similar to:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)... "Windows 2000"

Add a line after this
C:\boot.lnx="Ubuntu Linux"

save the file and set it back as a hidden system file

Reboot your PC and you should now have an option to get back into the Ubuntu.

---

Personally I'd go with Grub, it's a hell of a lot easier to setup

Rollo Tamasi

i wouldn't be too familar with command line stuff on linux so i went for the simple option > installed ubuntu again

thanks for the advise nonetheless.

NutJob

Never seen that done before very smart hack ill remember that.
Thanks Silas

philologos

silas wrote:

Alternatively you can use the Windows 2000 boot manager to boot into Ubuntu.

If you can boot into Linux with a boot floppy or alternatively with the CD.

open up a terminal
put a floppy in the drive
mount it

mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

Then copy the 1st 512 bytes of the main boot partition onto a file on the floppy (use / partition if /boot is not on a separate partition, i'll assume it's /dev/hda1 on your pc, but could be different).

dd count=1 bs=512 if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/floppy/boot.lnx

Unmount the floppy

umount /dev/fd0

Reboot into Windows, copy the boot.lnx file into the C:\ drive

Unhide all system files in explorer (in Folder settings)
Edit a file called "boot.ini"
Locate a section called [Operating Systems]
Underneath this, there should be a line with something similar to:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)... "Windows 2000"

Add a line after this
C:\boot.lnx="Ubuntu Linux"

save the file and set it back as a hidden system file

Reboot your PC and you should now have an option to get back into the Ubuntu.

---

Personally I'd go with Grub, it's a hell of a lot easier to setup

Great tut m8 will have to try it some time

nadir

windows overwrites the MBR becasue it sucks ass.
so yeah installing grub again afterwards is the suual way.

mp3guy

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/phbc50/howtos/how-to_reinstall_grub?highlight=%28grub%29