Booting win2003 from grub

**maskedbeagle** · 11-22-2006, 12:52 PM

my systems got several partions and several os/s - im trying to get organised to a point where I can just run them under XEN.

my win2003 partion is on sda5 (i.e. not first partition, which has 64bit XP). unbelievable as it sounds - when you have 2 windows systems, they can only be booted by the windows boot manager! which means I cant get it to boot from xen.

I figure if I can boot the partion directly from grub, then I can work out how to do in in xen - ive asked in windows forums, but BIG silence, - they just have no idea.

someone here must have hit that problem? any ideas?

maskedbeagle

**Kernel_Killer** · 11-22-2006, 03:16 PM

Can you post the part of Grub that is trying to load this? In the meantime, try this:

title Windows 2003
rootnoverify (hd4,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

I've had issues where I'd have to map the drive to map it to be the first one, but wouldn't want to try that until this is tried. You can confuse grub with the mapping, and then have to force the flags back.

**maskedbeagle** · 11-23-2006, 12:31 PM

Error I get is:
selected Disk does not exist
when trying hd4,0

my win2003 section is
rootnoverify (hd0,5)
makeactive
chainloader +1

The error i get is "invalid device requsted"

If I take out makeactive It boots the windows boot loader menu, which took be by surprise

I dont really think its a grub issue, my guess is something needs to happen to the windows partion, or installation - but I dont no what

thanks for taking time to reply

maskedbeagle

**Kernel_Killer** · 11-23-2006, 09:35 PM

Oops. Try the root drive as (0,5). Got the numbers mixed up. If that still doesn't work, you need to map the drive to be 0, and 0 to be 5. This is where it can get frustrating. The only reason I didn't post that solution is because if it's set wrong, the 5th partition will still be flaged as 0, the 1st partition as 5 (even after a reboot), and you won't be able to get into any of them until you flag them back to normal. It's been awhile since I had to flag drives back to normal, so I really can't give you instructions if it gets messed up. All I remember is that I had to remap them from the bootloader itself. So you might take a look at what the "map" function does, and how to map in the bootloader itself. Sorry that I cannot shed any more light on it than that.

**maskedbeagle** · 11-24-2006, 01:08 PM

hey Kernel_Killer - ok thanks i'll follow that up see what I learn
happy kernel killing

**GhostDawg** · 11-27-2006, 06:46 AM

Have you tried installing grub to MBR? I have Debian's grub as my main bootloader along with XP on hda1 and 2 other distros.

Then I got a copy of Vista and installed it on /dev/hda6 and to no surprise, it took over the mbr, so I had to reinstall grub and then I thought I had to add visa to the grub menu list. So I mucked around trying to get it to run from grub with no luck.

I hardly use XP but decided to go do some updates and low & behold, visa bootloader was shining. But the funny thing about it, it had choices, Vista and 'some other OS', it didn't say windows xp. Maybe that will be fixed in final version.

Anyway, just a thought!