Windows Vista and Ubuntu 12.04LTS

Question

I currently have a PC with a beautifully running Windows Vista OS on my 320g hard drive and have Ubuntu 12.04LTS on a 160g hard drive. Both OS's work perfectly!

When I want to run Ubuntu I go to my PC's bios and change the boot sequence for the hard drives depending on what OS I want to load.

Is there a way of creating a boot menu when I turn on the computer now with two already installed perfectly working OS's ?

When I installed 12.04LTS I thought this is what would of happened automatically. If not it's okay I'll stick to it this way. Don't want to damage anything.

Answer 1

I'm confident you can just tell Grub about the Windows installation and use it to select the OS to load on startup. I haven't mucked about with this in a while, but this page should get you on the right track: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

Answer 2

Ubuntu's bootloader (Grub) can offer to boot to Windows. That's the default, anyway. When you boot to your 160GB drive the should be a menu appear. If there isn't hold the left Shift key and that should force it to come up.

If Windows isn't an option on that screen, make sure you shut Windows down properly (quite important), boot into Ubuntu and run sudo update-grub. That should tell you all the options it's adding to the boot menu as it runs.

If you don't see Windows, run sudo os-prober and see if that detects it and then update your question accordingly.

But if that works, after that you can leave BIOS pointing at your 160GB drive and use Grub to switch. You can edit Grub options to make it more usable too, like changing the default, changing the timeouts, etc.