Vista won't boot anymore

[VexBanner]

Hello,
I'm fairly new to Linux and recently wanted to give Linux Mint 9 KDE RC a go. I decided to back up my laptop hard drive to an external using Acronis Disk Director. The original drive had a recovery partition in fat32 and Vista on the main partition (in ntfs). Once that was backed up, I did a clean install of Mint on my laptop hard drive with my external plugged in, so that the installation would recognise windows and add a grub entry. Now that everything is installed, the grub entry for windows is there, but when I select it, I just get a black screen with a flashing underscore, and windows won't load. I suspect that the Vista bootloader didn't back up onto the external hard-drive, but I am not sure about where to start in trying to solve this problem. Is it an mbr issue? If so, how do I get the Vista bootloader onto the external hard drive? I have tried googling this, but I can't find any solutions for something specific like this. I hope someone here can help me with this challenge.

Thanks!

[tdockery97]

Did you make a recovery disk? If you did, when it boots up select the terminal option, change directories so you are in the root directory (cd /), and then type:
bootrec /fixmbr. That should repair the windows mbr. Then just to be sure, go back into the linux terminal and: sudo update-grub. That's what I would try first.

[oobetimer]

Hello,
I'm fairly new to Linux and recently wanted to give Linux Mint 9 KDE RC a go. I decided to back up my laptop hard drive to an external using Acronis Disk Director. The original drive had a recovery partition in fat32 and Vista on the main partition (in ntfs). Once that was backed up, I did a clean install of Mint on my laptop hard drive with my external plugged in, so that the installation would recognise windows and add a grub entry. Now that everything is installed, the grub entry for windows is there, but when I select it, I just get a black screen with a flashing underscore, and windows won't load. I suspect that the Vista bootloader didn't back up onto the external hard-drive, but I am not sure about where to start in trying to solve this problem. Is it an mbr issue? If so, how do I get the Vista bootloader onto the external hard drive? I have tried googling this, but I can't find any solutions for something specific like this. I hope someone here can help me with this challenge.

Thanks!

Vista's bootflag has faded..

Repair Vista's boot:

http://www.lancelhoff.com/how-to-fix-vi ... ken-vista/

Code: Select all

bootrec.exe /fixboot

[VexBanner]

Thanks for the replies so far. Unfortunately, when I load up the Vista Recovery Disk, the Windows OS on my external hard drive does not get detected. It's stupid, because it asks me to load the drivers, and when I browse for one, I can access my external hard drive.

[StanTheMan]

Load a partition editor such as gparted , KPartitonManager , or CFDISK , and see if the Vista partgiton has BOOT flag set. Mincrosoft Windows I think always requires BOOT flag (Active) set to boot.
Most partition editors only read one disk at a time, and you have to specify which device you want to display.

[VexBanner]

Okay, my external drive was not flagged as boot, but now that I've flagged it nothing has changed, including the problem in Vista's System Recovery Options. It did seem like a good idea tho!