Booting windows from second hard drive

[sceo]

I replaced my primary hard drive in my laptop with a 120GB SSD. I have a second hard drive (the original 640GB) that I put into the optical bay. The original 640GB has a few partitions on it, mostly for storage, but one in particular that is for my Windows 7 installation.

When I boot off the 120 into Mint from Grub2, all works well -- I auto-mount that second drive in /etc/fstab and use it fairly seamlessly.

However, I want the option to choose the Windows 7 install from the Grub2 boot menu. When I run update-grub, it detects it on that drive and writes out an entry for it:

Code: Select all

### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###
menuentry "Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sdb2)" --class windows --class os {
   insmod part_msdos
   insmod ntfs
   set root='(hd0,msdos2)'
   search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root CC70378A703779F2
   chainloader +1
}
menuentry "Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sdb3)" --class windows --class os {
   insmod part_msdos
   insmod ntfs
   set root='(hd0,msdos3)'
   search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root AC7C4EC27C4E86D4
   chainloader +1
}
### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###


I believe the /dev/sdb2 is a recovery partition that Dell put on there. The /dev/sdb3 is the real Windows installation (based on sizes of these partitions).

Here's the thing, when I boot to the grub> prompt, and do an ls, I don't see (hd0,msdos3) there (or msdos2 for that matter). I only see msdos1, 5, and 6. 1 is my /, 5 is my /home, and 6 I think is my swap, because I can't ls it.

How come they're not available to grub? Also, I would expect them to be (hd1) probably, but my expectations could be wrong.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

[wayne128]

Check which grub version is installed.
grub-install -v


may be you can try manual method to boot windows this way,
when you are at grub menu, choose the line that reads

Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sdb3)

Then you press e to edit the line

You should see some text that read below

insmod part_msdos
insmod ntfs
set root='(hd0,msdos3)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root AC7C4EC27C4E86D4
chainloader +1
}


Move cursor to the hd0,msdos3 line, change the 0 to 1,
then look at the instruction at the bottom of the screen, should be ctrl x or f10 to boot,
just follow its instruction to boot win7..
see if this works.

if yes, then make some change to grub to make it permanent.