Windows 7 & Kubuntu 10.10 GRUB problem

[clay_the_arc]

I had my Laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1520, running Windows 7 and Windows XP - I had a few gigs of unallocated space, so I decided to install Kubuntu alongside it, worked fine no problem, with the exception of running out of space very quickly - I got fed up with it, and installed Kubuntu over the Windows XP partition (around 80gigs, and the first OS to be installed on the computer). After I installed it, all was working perfectly until I rebooted to discover I am missing my Windows 7 boot option in GRUB, before I had to press Windows XP Embedded and it opened the boot dialog, but here I dont get the option, is there a GRUB 2 option I can change to allow it to show Windows 7?

P.S. The Computer works perfectly, it's just the GRUB doesn't show Windows 7, and I'm hesitant to format its old partition and reinstall it due to the fact that it may over ride the grub and leave me without Kubuntu access, any suggestions?

[ramin.honary]

You may just need to add another entry to the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file. Another possibility is the the /boot/grub/device.map file does not indicate which device contains the Windows image. You may need to regenerate this file with the "grub-mkdevicemap" command. Once you have the correct device.map file setup, you can run the "grub-mkconfig" command to automatically re-create the default grub configuration using the new map file, and that should solve the problem.

Another possibility is that Windows doesn't like playing second fiddle to Linux. The Complete GNU GRUB Manual has a brief mention of this problem here:

GRUB cannot boot DOS or Windows directly, so you must chain-load them (see Chain-loading). However, their boot loaders have some critical deficiencies, so it may not work to just chain-load them. To overcome the problems, GRUB provides you with two helper functions. If you have installed DOS (or Windows) on a non-first hard disk, you have to use the disk swapping technique, because that OS cannot boot from any disks but the first one. The workaround used in GRUB is the command drivemap