Dual Boot Vista/Linux

Hey all, just after a bit of help dual booting vista(SP1) with Ubuntu (v8.04.1).

Basiclly, I had vista installed first on main HD, shrunk the partition by 30GB to make way for the Ubuntu installation.
Installed Ubuntu on the newly made 30GB, the installion went perfect without any errors.
However at the end of the installation it asked to remove CD and reboot, which I did, but after the reboot the machine booted straight in to vista and I cant seem to boot into Ubuntu.

I have read up a fair bit on GRUB but am not 100% thats what I need, do I just need to amend the MBR in vista (I tought Ubuntu installation would have done this TBH), if so how do I do this?

Slightly confused

Thanks in advance.

Z

Maybe this will help you. http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=975

Sounds to me like you didn't install grub to the MBR, but I've never tried to dual boot with Vista.... I'm also not familiar with Ubuntu... Ima Slackware/Arch/Gentoo Kat.

biosboy, thanks for the reply.

The guide you gave made sense but was aimed more toward fedora so I did a google for "install grub to mbr ubuntu" and came across this:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351

So booted into linux using the CD followed the guide in the above link, rebooted and now the GRUB menu apears BUT. . . When I click on linux or vista I get "No such partition exists" for linux and "missing bootmgr" for vista.

Have I screwd up the MBR?

I can still boot in to windows and linux from CD so its OK, just annoying lol.

Thanks again.

no you havent screwed up your mbr

what you need to do is go into linux and in a terminal type
this will spit out a bunch of stuff here is what mine looks like


Notice the NTFS is at sda1 which is my windows partition for grub this translates into the number zero

so my /boot/grub/menu.lst looks like this

so you just have to adjust the second number (assuming you have only 1 hd) to go one number back from whatever the fdisk -l showed you

so if your windows drive is on say sda4 then your grub would be

Grub must be installed on the mbr of the first disk that the bios boots. It does not matter if this is a windows or linux install. To add to the mbr, you write grub to sd0, hd0, sd1, hd1, etc. (i.e. no second number... no sd0,1 or hd1,0... that writes to a partition, not to the mbr).

Vista and all other MS products are incapable of booting non-MS OS's. GRUB can boot just about anything.