[SOLVED] Can Grub boot Vista/W7?

[littlebigman]

Hello

I use CloneZilla to image partitions and Grub 0.97 in the MBR to boot the os restored in /sda1.

Although it works fine with XP, I can't get Vista or Windows7 to boot. For instance, Vista fails with error 0xc00000e and is unable to load WINLOAD.EXE.

I don't know if it's something in Windows or maybe Grub needs something else besides the following in menu.lst to be able to load Vista and W7?

parttype (hd0,0) 0x7
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Thank you.

[yancek]

Grub can definitely boot vista and windows 7. I did a quick google of the error message you posted and found a lot of people had this problem with vista. Various solutions offered. Have you tried using EasyBCD (free download) to modify your vista/win 7 bootloader after restoring the image? Were your vista/win 7 partitions OEM or did you install them yourself? Did you have separate boot partitions for either? The win 7 on the machine I have has a small boot partition but I really don't use windows so I don't know if that has anything to do with the problem.

Also, the error is a windows error so it wouldn't have anything to do with Grub. Sorry I can't help more.

[littlebigman]

Thanks for the tip, but Windows7 still refuses to run after restoring its image from the second partition using CloneZilla :-/

I'd rather not use tools like EasyBCD to recover the image after restoration, as the whole point of imaging is to make it fast and easy to reinstall a clean image.

Maybe W7 requires using different options in CloneZilla than XP or Vista when saving or restoring the image.

[yancek]

I'd rather not use tools like EasyBCD

Agreed. Should not need to use it with a cloned image. It's a handy tool to have around when you need it though.

How are you booting the restored partition? I assume you have Grub on the mbr and a Linux partition on the box. The error message in your first post is a windows error so it would seem Grub is passing the booting to windows. Seems like something may have gone wrong with cloning the image. Have you tried googling the error you got and attempting to implement any of the suggestions? This seemed to be a common problem, though not necessarily with cloned images.

[littlebigman]

Thanks for the helps. After much reading, it seems like Windows7 uses the bytes in the MBR that identify a disk, and isn't happy when this information is replaced by restoring a different OS. The solution is boot Windows7, empty all items in the Registry HKLM\System\MountedDevices except "Default", and then cloning Windows7.

[devils casper]

I was following this thread and looking for solution.
Thanx for sharing solution with us.