Turn Grub off - win boot loader on.

[caz]

Sorry about this but it's a bit of a windows question.
Reinstalled vista the other day, don't use it myself but folk at my local camera club do and they are rather resistant about using non Microsoft stuff, anyway the problem I've got is that I can't get vista to install service pack 2. From what I can make out it's due to the fact that after downloading and installing the system reboots and then hits the grub boot loader. Apparently vista doesn't like this very much and aborts the final installation. It appears that for the installation to complete it needs to find the windows boot loader.
So, I guess what I'm asking is is there way to turn Grub off and then have vista find the win boot loader?

I would prefer not to damage my Mint 17 Cinnamon installation in the process, but I have got Mate 17 installed on another hdd so if any problems are encountered I will still have an working OS.

I must admit this is turning out to be a rather painful experience, as in vista takes an age to install updates, but it's just one of those things that's bugging me, and I need to know if there's a answer to the problem.

I've added a screenshot for Gparted in case it's of help.

Cheers for any advice on this.

Screenshot--dev-sdc - GParted.png

[PatH57]

Hi,


your partition scheme is strange
swap at the begining?
sdc3 seems to be your windows partition?

Remove the swap partition and see if windows continues the installation (you may have to reinstall vista
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot

section install windows after ubuntu mint...

[caz]

I'm not quite sure how the partition set-up happened. When I installed vista I assumed it would wipe everything out on the hard drive but instead it used one of the existing partitions for its install. The existing partitions were for swap, root, boot and home on a LM16 install. I guess the partition set-up for LM17 got messed up because vista installed itself right in the middle - not sure about that though, I'm no expert in these matters. Vista was the first OS to be installed.

sdc3 is the windows partition.

I will try removing swap and see what happens.

[Derek_S]

Hello caz - I have a question for you. When the grub boot menu appears after system boot, which operating system appears at the top of the screen and is highlighted as the default boot system? Is it Windows Vista or is it Linux Mint? If it's Linux Mint, you may want to try changing it to Windows Vista and see if the Windows update problem goes away. See here how to download and install the Grub Customizer by Daniel Richter: http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/201 ... -10-13-04/
This utility will allow you to change the boot order if needed and put Windows Vista at the top.

If this doesn't solve the problem, then I would try this approach, if possible: Wipe the hard drive and re-install Vista. Do all of your system updates, including Service Pack 2. Once this is done, shrink the C: partition of Vista and re-install Linux Mint. EDIT: I just thought of something else, try the suggestion below this first!!!

EDIT: Several months ago, I worked on a Windows 7 laptop for a friend of my family. She had neglected to keep the machine up to date, and had never installed Win 7 Service Pack 1, which was released back in March 2010!!! I tried over and over to install it from Windows Update and failed repeatedly. I finally had to download the stand alone installer for Win 7 Service Pack 1 and succeeded with installing it. Did you try this approach? The download link for Vista Service Packs is here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... tabs=vista

[caz]

Hi, Derek.

I won't be able to try your suggestion about changing the order of where windows appears in the boot order as I've found a different solution to the problem. It does sound as if it may have worked though. Windows was the third in the list of boot options, behind Mint Mate and if front of Mint Cinnamon.
From what I discovered vista needs its own boot loader to make the final install of service pack 2, other updates seem to be unaffected by the choice of boot loader. So what I did was to set the bios to boot from the vista install DVD, clicked on repair then command prompt. After that I entered this line Bootrec.exe/fixmbr hit enter and the exited from the DVD loader.
When I rebooted vista found its own boot loader and the service pack and some other updates were installed successfully.
Grub was no longer available after running the Bootrec command but I had an idea that I hoped would bring it back. I have a second hdd which I had unplugged whilst I messed around trying to get vista to update. I plugged this one back in, set the bios to boot from this drive. Grub appeared after rebooting and I fired up Mint Mate and then ran sudo update-grub in the terminal just to be sure everything was okay.

So it's a solution of sorts that worked for me. There are many tutorials on reinstalling grub so even without the benefit of a second hdd this method should still work.

I did try the stand alone installer for sp2 but it didn't work at the time as Grub was still in control of the boot, So it appears that these kind of updates cannot be done unless windows finds its own loader.

Here's a link to a better write up on the method I used, just in case anyone has a similar problem http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic. ... 6&t=158228

And now that I've got vista up and running I don't suppose I will hardly ever use it. Still something new learnt.

[PatH57]

in fact it does work, I did a bit more digging yesterday evening and also discovered that some service pack do patch the windows boot loader that's why it needs to be present and not chainloaded , so as long as you installed windows first and kept it at the beginning of the drive it will work if it is somewhere else and presented to the package updater in another way it will confuse the process and abort. Didn't see this one coming... that said guess they won't be too many service packs coming out. (I'll check the MS knowledge base and try to find witch specific update could break the process)

[Derek_S]

Hello caz - I'm glad to hear you got things sorted out as far as Vista is concerned. Your solution showed some real ingenuity. I guess the fact that you had Mint 17 Mate installed to a separate drive saved the day for you when it came time to put things back together again.

I don't know if you would want to go through all the trouble, but here's something to think about. Install Vista to it's own separate hard drive. Then install your two Linux Mint distros together on the second hard drive. When you install grub, put it on the second drive also. Leave the MBR area on the first drive alone. Then set your BIOS boot order so the second drive has boot priority over the first. If you ever need to do another massive update to Vista, then it would be a simple matter of entering BIOS and giving the first drive containing Vista boot priority over the second drive containing grub and your two Linux systems. I know it's a lot of work to re-install three operating systems, especially when it comes to installing and updating Vista, but having Vista isolated from the other two systems might be better in the long run.

[caz]

Thanks Pat and Derek for the advice. I think I will set vista so that it is shown first in Grub and see how I get on with things set-up that way. But as has been said it's unlikely that vista will be getting too many more upgrades - it's an old system now.

My second hdd is an SSD drive. I had it partitioned for when I first installed Mint 17 - home, boot, swap and root. This seemed to cause a lot of problems. I run Gimp 2.8.10 a lot and it's usually solid as a rock, but on the partitioned drive there were many times when it crashed. This had never happened when I was running earlier version of Mint and hasn't happened since I did a reinstall of Mint 17 minus the partitions. Maybe it's no more than a coincidence and it was no more than a bad install
that was causing the crashes, but I do remember the guy in the shop where I got the SSD from saying that it was not a good idea to partition these types of drives. No idea how true that is though.

I'm going to mark this as Solved-ish as my way of getting Grub back was a bit of a cheat

[PatH57]

strange the ssd story, I have 3 of them and no problem so far (all with 3 partitions)
Only thing I did was to check if they support trim as it is now part of ubuntu 14.04 and Mint17. (auto trim)
One of the drives is a cheap no name ssd and some cheap SSDs can even brick themselves when running TRIM so I disabled it on this unit.
That said it is running for the last 6 months and had windows, mint,ubuntu and suse on it, no complians so far. It's not a server so reliability is not a concern or I would have gone for a RAID system anyway.
I rather think it's a setup problem (an ssd drive can keep some information even if you think you have wipped it or recreated the partition)

[Mark Phelps]

I do remember the guy in the shop where I got the SSD from saying that it was not a good idea to partition these types of drives.

That's rubbish. I have several SSDs (in different PCs) and ALL of them have multiple partitions, and NONE of them are presenting any problems at all.

[Derek_S]

Hello caz - Mark Phelps is absolutely right. The fellow in the shop does not know what he is talking about. Brand new machines with Windows 8/8.1 installed on SSD drives have 5 or more partitions installed. Do you think a manufacturer such as HP or Lenovo would risk consumer warranty claims if such a thing was true?

One thing in light of the fact you mentioned a SSD drive being part of your system: Do you have Windows Vista installed on the SSD or on the conventional drive? I'll have to search for it, but I remember reading somewhere that one of Vista's new features (at the time) was to perform disk defragmentation when the system was at low activity or idle. This would be very detrimental to the life of your SSD. If Vista is on the conventional drive, then no problem. If it's on the SSD, you should think about switching things around.

[PatH57]

Derek,


SSDs had this kind of problems back in the ages of vista coming out and they had problems with more then one partition 6 or seven years ago.
I's all gone now. Both you and the computer shop guy refer to something heard before
Newer OS and SSD even autotrim nowadays so no real need to do anything but disable autotrim for cheap SSD (then again in a year the cheapones will have it also)

[caz]

Cheers, Guys. Lots of info about things I knew nothing of.
First off vista lives on an old conventional drive, it's around eight years old but still works okay as far as I can tell. The SSD drive is much newer, only a couple of years. It does support TRIM but it hasn't been enabled. There isn't very much on this drive, only LM17 Mate which makes it five percent full, and it seems to work pretty fast, faster than the drive that has visa and Cinnamon on it.Might be worth a mention though I have no idea as to whether it would have led to the problems I did have with Gimp. I have a 3rd hdd which holds all my Gimp files, pictures and the like. There is no OS on this drive it's just store room basically.

Maybe it was just a bad install that caused the problems I was having with Gimp and LM17 Mate, don't know enough about this kind of thing to be sure though.
I am planing on enabling TRIM and found this brief tutorial on how to do it http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/201 ... rformance/ Just wondering if this looks okay for a Mint system?

[PatH57]

caz,

First thing is to check if the drive firmware is the latest one.

Code: Select all

sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdX

Model Number: INTEL SSDSA2M160G2GC
Serial Number: CVPO93050129160AGN
Firmware Revision: 2CV102M3
Transport: Serial, ATA8-AST, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5, SATA Rev 2.6
............
* Data Set Management TRIM supported (limit 8 blocks)
* Deterministic read ZEROs after TRIM

it will give you firmware and info about trim

LM17 supports trim and has it set to weekly. You can check if it is enabled:

Code: Select all

locate fstrim

/etc/cron.weekly/fstrim
/sbin/fstrim

if the etc/cron.weekly is there no need to do anything.

Else
check that:

Code: Select all

sudo fstrim -v /

works

if it doesn't your drive is not supported or has a firmware bug.

[wayne128]

So, I guess what I'm asking is is there way to turn Grub off and then have vista find the win boot loader?

Install EasyBCD from NeoSmart.

Then add grub2 entry to boot Linux OSes.

Then let vista take over MBR.

This way, vista will restart to its boot loader.
Linux OSes can still boot eventhough vista updates, or even repair boot and replace by its boot manager.

[caz]

Install EasyBCD from NeoSmart.

Then add grub2 entry to boot Linux OSes.

Then let vista take over MBR.

This way, vista will restart to its boot loader.
Linux OSes can still boot eventhough vista updates, or even repair boot and replace by its boot manager.

Thanks, Wayne, it looks like BCD would be a good solution for sorting out boot problems with Linux and Windows. I will try it out if I get any more update problems with vista.

@ PatH57

Thanks for the info Pat. I tried "sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdX" but got this output from terminal

Code: Select all

/dev/sdX: No such file or directory

So I tried "locate fstrim" and got this

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$ locate fstrim
/etc/cron.weekly/fstrim
/sbin/fstrim
/sbin/fstrim-all
/usr/share/man/man8/fstrim-all.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/fstrim.8.gz

I tried the final code "sudo fstrim -v /" and got this

Code: Select all

sudo fstrim -v /
/: 111062528000 bytes were trimmed

So it looks to me as if trim is supported and enabled, but I have no idea as to why there is no info about the drive's firmware.

[Derek_S]

Derek,
SSDs had this kind of problems back in the ages of vista coming out and they had problems with more then one partition 6 or seven years ago.
I's all gone now. Both you and the computer shop guy refer to something heard before

Hello PatH57 - I agree with you where SSDs are concerned: It's true that present day SSDs are much more robust and dependable than the ones that were sold in the era of Windows Vista being Microsoft's premier operating system.

But I have to disagree with you on this: Defragmenting the Windows NTFS file system is very harmful to a SSD over a period of time. The number of read/delete/rewrite operations involved during this process is staggering. And Windows Vista is especially harmful in this respect because it performs disk defragmentation in the background whenever it senses low system activity. This is not something I merely read about, I got to experience this first hand. My Lenovo Thinkpad T400 laptop had Windows Vista Business 32 Bit installed when I first purchased it. I had Windows Vista installed only long enough to visit Lenovo's support website in order to locate, download, and install all the most recent BIOS and firmware updates. During this time, the hard disk activity light was constantly on regardless of what I was doing. Once I had everything up to date, I wiped the entire drive and installed openSUSE. I immediately noticed the difference. Once I booted openSUSE to desktop, the hard disk activity light went out, and it did not come on until I started an application. I didn't imagine this, nor did I merely read about it.

Years later, I stumbled upon a thread where someone else described the very same activity on the part of Windows Vista: http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?sho ... ntry177494

[PatH57]

prefetch (totally forgot about this "feature")