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I am having trouble adding Windows 7 to my GRUB 2 boot menu. I know similar questions have been asked and answered on this site and others, but none of the answers seem to work for me.
My setup: Two hard drives, sda with a Win 7 installation and sdb with a Debian installation and GRUB2.
In my BIOS, I can choose which hard drive to boot from, and if I boot from the first hard drive Windows starts so I know that it is working. Now I want to add a menu item to GRUB to boot Windows.
I downloaded bootinfoscript and ran it, here is the RESULTS.txt:
Boot Info Script 0.61 [1 April 2012]
============================= Boot Info Summary: ===============================
=> Windows is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda.
=> Grub2 (v1.99) is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdb and looks at sector 2048
of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and
looks for (,gpt2)/boot/grub on this drive.
sda1: __________________________________________________________________________
File system:
Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7: NTFS
Boot sector info:
Mounting failed: mount: unknown filesystem type ''
sda2: __________________________________________________________________________
File system: ntfs
Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7: NTFS
Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block.
Operating System: Windows 7
Boot files: /Windows/System32/winload.exe
sdb1: __________________________________________________________________________
File system: BIOS Boot partition
Boot sector type: Grub2's core.img
Boot sector info:
sdb2: __________________________________________________________________________
File system: ext4
Boot sector type: -
Boot sector info:
Mounting failed: mount: unknown filesystem type ''
mount: /dev/sdb2 already mounted or sdb2 busy
sdb3: __________________________________________________________________________
File system: swap
Boot sector type: -
Boot sector info:
============================ Drive/Partition Info: =============================
Drive: sda _____________________________________________________________________
Disk /dev/sda: 256.1 GB, 256060514304 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 31130 cylinders, total 500118192 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2,048 206,847 204,800 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS
/dev/sda2 206,848 500,115,455 499,908,608 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS
Drive: sdb _____________________________________________________________________
Disk /dev/sdb: 3000.6 GB, 3000592982016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 364801 cylinders, total 5860533168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 4,294,967,295 4,294,967,295 ee GPT
GUID Partition Table detected.
Partition Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors System
/dev/sdb1 2,048 4,095 2,048 BIOS Boot partition
/dev/sdb2 4,096 2,605,768,703 2,605,764,608 Data partition (Windows/Linux)
/dev/sdb3 2,605,768,704 2,639,306,751 33,538,048 Swap partition (Linux)
"blkid" output: ________________________________________________________________
Device UUID TYPE LABEL
/dev/sda2 DCA04533A0451584 ntfs
/dev/sdb2 ea61c63c-0a93-44fb-894c-f652c28b67d0 ext4
/dev/sdb3 ca9c61ec-f99e-428c-bdf3-65fbbfc4b43b swap
================================ Mount points: =================================
Device Mount_Point Type Options
/dev/disk/by-uuid/ea61c63c-0a93-44fb-894c-f652c28b67d0 / ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,user_xattr,barrier=1,data=ordered)
/dev/sda2 /mnt/win fuseblk (ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096)
=============================== StdErr Messages: ===============================
xz: (stdin): Compressed data is corrupt
OS-prober does not seem to be able to detect my Win7 installation. If I run update-grub2 (which I believe in turn runs OS-prober) it will output:
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found background image: /usr/share/images/desktop-base/desktop-grub.png
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-4-amd64
done
I have tried some variations on GRUB menu entries (by modifying /etc/grub.d/40_custom and then running update-grub2). Here are some of them:
The first one is simple, inspired by (for instance) this link: http://technologytales.com/2010/11/21/manually-adding-an-entry-for-windows-7-to-an-ubuntu-grub2-menu/
menuentry 'Windows 7' {
set root='(hd0,2)'
chainloader +1
}
This will not boot, and results in the following output from GRUB:
Booting a command list
error: invalid signature.
Press any key to continue...
Then I tried this:
menuentry 'Windows 7' --class windows --class os {
insmod part_msdos
insmod ntfs
set root='(hd0,2)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root DCA04533A0451584
chainloader +1
}
which results in:
BOOTMGR is missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart
and then I tried:
menuentry 'Windows 7' --class windows --class os {
insmod part_msdos
insmod ntfs
insmod ntldr
set root='(hd0,2)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root DCA04533A0451584
ntldr ($root)/Windows/System32/winload.exe
}
which does not work either (goes to an empty screen with a blinking cursor).
I am really at a loss here. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Update: I ran boot-repair-disk (as suggested by moses in comments) with default settings. It did not add a Win7 entry to the boot menu. Maybe it failed to detect the Win7 installation since it overwrote its MBR with GRUB. Here is a link to the boot-repair-disk log.
user829876
Posted 2013-08-30T07:10:53.673
Reputation: 141
Have you tried simply running the automatic Boot-repair-disk? It scans all operating systems and rebuilds grub without the need to manually do it. – Moses – 2013-08-30T13:39:25.207
Thanks for the tip! I didn't know boot-repair-disk existed. I ran it with default settings but did not add any entry to GRUB's menu. Updating the question above with boot-repair log. – user829876 – 2013-08-31T06:57:26.700