Dual booting Fedora 10 with vista result in no hibernation in vista. Fix?

[premudriy]

Hi everyone,

I was bored today and decided to check if my usb keyboard wakes vista from hibernation. I found out though that it won't hibernate at all.

I traced the problem to vista having problems with grub.


I have 2 SATA hard drives: one with vista and one with Fedora 10. Dual boot through grub. Both OSs boot without errors, but hibernation in vista is gone. When I change the boot order in BIOS and boot vista directly, the hibernation works, but booting via grub result in no hibernation.

I've read many how-to's and found that vista has something called "BCD Store" (whatever that is) and that it's not accessible when booting from Grub. I've read that I can recreate that "store" with "bcdedit /createstore", but it always says "not recognized file system, can't create." It almost seems that windows sees the Fedora hard drive as the OS drive or something.

Here's my current Grub section that boots vista:

title windows
	rootnoverify (hd1,0)
	chainloader +1

I've tried to put "makeactive" between rootnoverify and chainloader - same thing, no hibernation and bcd store is not available.


My best guess is that I'm missing something in my Grub entry for windows. Can anyone help, please?

[premudriy]

Ok, I'm back after spending quite a while on researching this problem. Now I know what is going on, but unfortunately there might not be an easy solution if we stick with Fedora's GRUB.

So, basically M$ made vista hibernate ONLY if vista is on active drive and on active partition. Also, and most importantly, the drive with vista has to be booted as active in order for hibernation to work. Under "active drive" I mean the drive that's set in bios to boot from, NOT just an active partition on the drive.

I have 2 hard drives. One is with Fedora and GRUB is installed on that drive as well. The other drive has vista. Of course, the drive with Fedora is the "active" one in my case because I need to load GRUB to point to my OSs.

Therefore, vista sees that it's drive was not booted from and thus it's not "active" one. Vista then looks into active drive, i.e. in my drive with GRUB and can't find a BCDstore, which it need to hibernate.

This article:
http://www.multibooters.co.uk/bootmgr.html
says that it's possible to fool vista into thinking that it's drive is the "active" one, but it's possible to do only with bootmanagers which are able to do "drive swap" before they boot a given OS.

Now, I don't really know much about GRUB's capabilities. Does it able to do such a "drive swap" before booting as mentioned above? Is "map (hd1) (hd0) map (hd0) (hd1)" the command that takes care of drive swap or is that different?

Should I email developers of GRUB about it?

[stoat]

Should I email developers of GRUB about it?

Surely, you're only jesting about that.

Hello premudriy,

Why not try having Vista be on the first drive in the BIOS boot order? Fedora can exist and work perfectly well on a non-first drive. And you can still have GRUB exist in the master boot record of the first drive and be your main boot loader. People do it all the time. Furthermore, the Vista system partition (the one with Vista's boot loader files), can still be the active partition because GRUB doesn't care about active partitions at all. Maybe that will solve your hibernation issue since Vista's BCD will then be in the root directory of the active partition of the first drive in the BIOS boot order when Vista wakes up. According to your referenced article, that is apparently all that it cares about...

Because of the way the Microsoft bootmanager works the Vista operating system expects that the BCD will always be on the system partition, so during bootup the Vista OS opens the system partition BCD. When using the Microsoft bootmanager the system partition is always the active primary partition on the drive seen in the BIOS as the first boot hard drive, even if that is not the partition you are actually running Windows from. When using a third-party bootmanager the system partition is usually the partition you are booted into, even if that is on a second or higher hard drive or a logical partition, which means that the BCD inside your booted Vista is not necessarily on the boot drive active primary. Unfortunately and rather inconveniently when Vista boots up it is not the system partition as seen by Vista itself that is chosen for the location of the BCD to open, but instead the partition that Windows considers should be the system partition, namely the boot drive active primary.

P.S.: Another idea is to install Vista on the first drive in the BIOS boot order and use Bootmgr to boot Fedora. People also do that all the time, too. The free utility EasyBCD makes that simple to do.

[premudriy]

Thanks for answering, Stoat! I thought this thread is doomed. I'll google on how to re-install grub and will try moving it to the MBR of the HDD with vista.




P.S.: I like GRUB's splash screen, so I'm trying to avoid using vista's boot manager.

[premudriy]

Hey, I found a solution without reinstalling GRUB to vista's HDD. I can't believe that I've searched for this solution for almost a month and it is actually really simple.

All I had to do is to copy the "Boot" folder and "bootmgr" file from vista's system drive to the first partition of Fedora drive. That's it.


Here's my HDD layout:

HDD1, 1st SATA drive (aka windoze drive):
Partition 0: windoze sys drive (C)
Partition 1: extra space (D)
Partition 2: extra space (E)

HDD2, 2dn SATA drive (Fedora drive; GRUB is Installed here; set to boot from it in BIOS):
Partition 0: small 5GB volume. Contains windoze swap file, that's where I copied "Boot" and "bootmgr" (F)
Partition 1: Fedora Boot partition (windoze can't see it, haha)
Partition 2: Fedora LVM with all my stuff (windoze can't see it as well)


This way I didn't change bootmanager of the original vista install AND I can use GRUB AND hibernation works in vista.


Thanks for your support, Stoat!