[No idea where this goes] Windows not booting.

[Gotestra]

Hello there!
The title says it all: Windows isn't booting as it should. Need an explanation? Here goes.

So recently, I decided to migrate to a linux operating system. I had tried Ubuntu with Wubi months ago. Then about two months, I wiped that off and installed Ubuntu as a dual boot. Everything worked fine. I used Windows all the time, mostly because Ubuntu has trackpad issues and the Unity UI is really annoying.

So I looked about into other OS's. Fedora seemed interesting to me, but was outweighed by Linux Mint and Easy Peasy.

( Just a side not: I have two pen drives, each of which have 1 GB capacity. )

I created a bootable USB via Unetbootin, and then deleted the Ubuntu patition from Windows. Turns out, that broke my grub bootloader. Luckily, I had Linux Mint with me and I successfully performed a boot repair. Then, I tried to install Mint but it gave me an error every time I tried to install it. There seems to be no workaround for me, so I tried Easy Peasy. It wouldn't fit in 1 GB.
[Which FYI comes to about 975 MB, because of storage manufacturers use 1000 MB for a gig]

I booted into Windows again, and reluctantly downloaded a Fedora iso to create a bootable USB. Once I had booted into Fedora, I loved it. My trackpad worked much better than it worked in Ubuntu. Not as good as Windows, but much better than Mint or Ubuntu. It looks amazing, and its fast.
So after 45 minutes, Fedora showed that I had successfully installed it to my HDD.

When I tried rebooting, then Grub wouldn't appear and it would boot straight into Windows. I used the bootable Mint USB to perform a boot repair and installed Grub to a separate partition. When I rebooted again, Grub did come up and showed Fedora. I started using Fedora, and I've been very happy with it. Then, I wanted to download a torrent that I've been meaning to download for a while. Deluge has an annoying bug that keeps downloading everything to the Home folder. So I wanted to boot back into Windows, and leave it on overnight for the download to finish.

When I rebooted and selected Windows, it gives me this error:
A disk read error has occurred. Press Cntrl+Alt+Del to restart.

I haven't really tried anything yet, despite having spent an hour reading about the possible solutions. Its probably not an HDD problem, because I can access all the files on my Windows partition.

So, help? I can't not use Windows forever :|

[marriedto51]

The standard windows answer would be to boot your installation DVD and choose to rescue the installed OS.

I did have problem booting a windows installation from grub in the past, and the solution that someone else suggested, which works for me, is detailed on this other thread: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpo...17&postcount=9.

[Gotestra]

marriedto51,

Hello there! I really appreciate your reply to my thread.

The problem is, I don't have an installation DVD. I bought this laptop in July of last year, and it came with Geniune Windows 7 pre-installed. Grub does show a Windows Recovery Environment on the OS list, but selecting and trying to boot that gives me the same error.

As for the thread that you linked, can you explain the solution to me? I'm pretty much a newbie to Linux and its terminal functions, because just in case you haven't noticed already, all the OS's that I have used in the past (Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, Puppy Linux) have full fledged GUI, which means that I didn't really get familiar with the terminal. I can run basic commands, but anything with the likes of what you linked to goes completely over my head.

[marriedto51]

OK, sorry if that was a bit obscure.

Before going into detail on what I was referring to, it occurs to me that you may have a disk fault in the part of the disk containing the NT bootloader -- that would mean you can't boot Windows, but can read the other files from your Fedora installation. Personally, I'd be tempted to run a proper disk check. There are tools available which you can run from a bootable CD (I've used SeaTools successfully myself). That said...

The change that I needed to make was to edit the file /boot/grub2/grub.cfg so as to change the method that the bootloader Grub uses to try to boot Windows.

You can edit your grub2.cfg by opening a terminal, and putting in these commands one by one:

su -
cd /boot/grub2
cp grub.cfg grub.cfg.orig
chmod u+w grub.cfg
gedit grub.cfg

You will need to enter your root password once. Also, this will create a backup file grub.cfg.orig in case you want or need to revert to the original setup.

Once the editor is open, scroll down to the section that starts

menuentry "Windows 7"

(Your entry might have slightly different text.) From there, move down and you should probably find a line that says

chainloader +1

It was that line that proved not to work (at least not reliably) for me, so I commented it out (that is, put a single '#' character on the front of the line) and added two new lines instead. The relevant section now looks like:

#chainloader +1
insmod ntldr
ntldr (${root})/bootmgr

Having done that, save and exit the editor, then type "exit" in the terminal. Now reboot and see what happens...

If that is no help, then you can recover the original Grub configuration with

su -c 'mv /boot/grub2/grub.cfg.orig /boot/grub2/grub.cfg'

in a terminal.

[Gotestra]

Now I'm facing a different issue.

Every time I try "su" and I enter my password, it says that its incorrect. The password I enter works fine when I use commands with "sudo", e.g.
"sudo yum install pidgin"

I tried what you said with sudo, and this is what happened so far:

[Gotestra@FedoraPC ~]$ su -
Password:
su: incorrect password
[Gotestra@FedoraPC ~]$ sudo cd /boot/grub2
[sudo] password for Gotestra:
sudo: cd: command not found
[Gotestra@FedoraPC ~]$ cd /boot/grub2
[Gotestra@FedoraPC grub2]$ cp grub.cfg.orig
cp: missing destination file operand after `grub.cfg.orig'
Try `cp --help' for more information.
[Gotestra@FedoraPC grub2]$ cp grub.cfg grub.cfg.orig
cp: cannot open `grub.cfg' for reading: Permission denied


So?

EDIT: I got through by using "sudo" on every line. I'll get back to you on this when I'm done.

[smr54]

Try sudo su

Note that there is a root password, for the root user which it seems that you don't know, and sudo which gives the current user rights to act as the root user.

Using su requires root's password.

Using sudo requires your password.

As for why cd command not found, this has to do with cd being a built in shell command.

[Gotestra]

Um.
Then what is the root password? I'm the administrator of this laptop (o.o)
And "sudo su" did work, thanks.

@Main Problem

SO now, Grub says:
Disk '' not found.
(Except that the second single inverted comma was a bit more slanting. But I think that's because it was displayed in 800x600.)

(-_-)

EDIT: I get why it didn't work. You forgot to mention the part about updating the grub.cfg file :P I opened grub.cfg again, and the changes I made weren't there. In Linux Mint and Ubuntu, you had to use "sudo update-grub" to update the grub.cfg file. I thought that it was different in Fedora, so I didn't think much about it. Turns out, it IS required, even in Fedora. The command is:
"su -c 'grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg'"

Rebooting and trying now

---------- Post added at 06:51 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:43 PM ----------

Nope, not working. I think the issue this time is that each time I reboot and open the grub.cfg file, the changes don't appear. The reason might be that Grub2 is located in a separate partition for me. The required command is probably different.

[DBelton]

When you run the grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg, it runs os-prober which will overwrite your manual changes to your Windows entry in your /boot/grub2/grub.cfg file.

If you manually change your Windows boot menu section in your /boot/grub2/grub.cfg file, then don't run grub2-mkconfig afterwards.

[smr54]

Another possibility is to create a /boot/grub2/custom.cfg

I go over this a bit on my page http://home.roadrunner.com/~computertaijutsu/grub2.html, though I don't cover Windows booting, (as I don't know it) but the custom.cfg will keep it from being overwritten by anything.

[marriedto51]

As others have said, you either edit grub.cfg manually (as I suggested) or edit the files in /etc/grub.d and use the command grub2-mkconfig (as smr54 suggested) -- but not both.

Can you post exactly what you have for the relevant section of your grub.cfg file? That would be everything from the "menuentry" line down to the next closing brace '}'.

[Gotestra]

Well, I have two partitions (sda1 and sda2) which show up on Grub as WIndows 7 Loader. sda1 is labeled SYSTEM in Gparted, while sda2 is the Windows 7 partition. I'll copy-paste the text for both of them.

menuentry 'Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda1)' --class windows --class os $menuentry_id_option 'osprober-chain-9458B40A58B3E95E' {
	insmod ldm
	insmod ntfs
	set root='ldm/a0c6e13d-bc73-11e0-87fc-e02a82064fa5/Volume1'
	if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then
	  search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0 --hint-efi=hd0 --hint-baremetal=ahci0 --hint='ldm/a0c6e13d-bc73-11e0-87fc-e02a82064fa5/Volume1'  9458B40A58B3E95E
	else
	  search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 9458B40A58B3E95E
	fi
	#chainloader +1
}
menuentry 'Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda2)' --class windows --class os $menuentry_id_option 'osprober-chain-6C447E1F447DEBE8' {
	insmod ldm
	insmod ntfs
	set root='ldm/a0c6e13d-bc73-11e0-87fc-e02a82064fa5/Volume2'
	if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then
	  search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0 --hint-efi=hd0 --hint-baremetal=ahci0 --hint='ldm/a0c6e13d-bc73-11e0-87fc-e02a82064fa5/Volume2'  6C447E1F447DEBE8
	else
	  search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6C447E1F447DEBE8
	fi
	#chainloader +1
}

---------- Post added at 10:29 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:17 PM ----------

Also, can somebody please explain what marriedto51's commands do? I'm trying to learn how Linux works, and copy-pasting things might get the work done, but it wont teach me anything.

[marriedto51]

It looks like in your grub.cfg you have no command in those sections to tell grub to boot. Make sure that you put the lines

insmod ntldr
ntldr (${root})/bootmgr

after the "#chainloader +1".

(I also noticed a typo in the commands I suggested above: I've corrected this now.)

To explain the commands I suggested, in short:

• su (like sudo) is a command to run other commands with another user's privileges
• cd changes the current working directory
• cp makes copies of files
• chmod changes the permissions on a file: who can read, write, or execute it

You can get reference information on a command by using "man" in a terminal: for example

man chmod

But that is often a very bad place to try to understand a command in the first instance. Try instead searching online for things like "linux commands tutorial".

What goes in the grub.cfg file is more mysterious to me. I know a little about what seems to work for me, and what doesn't, but not much more. The reference documentation is at http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html, but I've not yet seen any terribly easy-to-read tutorials.

[Gotestra]

Turns out, my disk isn't messed up. I grew pissed, and booted into Linux Mint Live. Then, after some googling on how-to, I ran a check on bad sectors. Test came back negative, i.e no bad sectors, which is precisely what I expected all along. So then, I downloaded and installed boot repair and selected "Restore MBR". I've booted into Windows 7 now, and I plan on doing a boot repair again to install Grub. I'll keep y'all posted on what happens.