A possible work-around to boot Windows 7
Below is a suggestion for editing your GRUB boot commands which may allow you to boot Windows 7. I am not sure this will work, but it seems worth trying.Currently your
grub.cfg
uses the GRUB boot commands below to boot Windows 7.menuentry "Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda1)" --class windows --class os {
insmod part_msdos
insmod ntfs
set root='(hd0,msdos1)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 1EA0019AA0017A13
chainloader +1
}
I am suggesting you try changing this and use these commands instead.menuentry "Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda1)" --class windows --class os {
insmod part_msdos
insmod ntfs
insmod ntldr
set root='(hd0,msdos1)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 1EA0019AA0017A13
ntldr ($root)/bootmgr
}
Here are the steps to do this. - Boot your system to the GRUB menu.
- Select (highlight) the GRUB boot menu entry
Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda1)
. - Press e to edit the GRUB boot commands for Windows 7.
- Make two changes to this list of commands as illustrated in the
menuentry
above.- Add the command
insmod ntldr
- Change the command
chainloader +1
tontldr ($root)/bootmgr
- Add the command
- Press either Ctrl+X or F10 to boot using these edited commands.
If the above work-around succeeds in loading the Windows 7 boot menu, then you could make it semi-persistent by
- Using
sudo
to edit the file/etc/grub.d/40_custom
and add the second, modifiedmenuentry
shown above. (If you do this, I'd also suggest you change the title of this "custom" entry.) - Run the command
sudo update-grub
to update/boot/grub/grub.cfg
to include your customized entry. (It will be on the bottom of the GRUB menu when you boot.)
I think ... but am not 100% sure ... that the Windows recovery command
bootsect
can be used to do this. If you want to risk it, one possible way to do this is outlined below.- When booting Windows, press F8 to bring up the
Advanced Boot Options
menu. - Select the
Repair Your Computer
entry. - Walk through the next windows until you reach
System Recovery Options
. - Select
Command Prompt
- Run the command
bootsect /nt60 C:
Note 2:
While searching for other things, I ran across two other questions on AskUbuntu which are related to your problem.
I'm not sure how much help these questions provide. The answer to the second question was to use the command
bootrec /fixboot
to restore the VBR for the Windows partition. My understanding from that question was that using the bootrec /fixboot
command solved the problem.But the second question insists that
bootrec /fixboot
did not solve the problem.(Beats the heck out of me as to what might be going on there.)