Cannot choose windows installation [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Ubuntu 12.4 and XP on Seperate Drives, Dual Boot, How?

I've never used Linux before in any form, but was always intrigued, so after a while of deciding whether to risk it I installed Ubuntu 12.04

During the installation I was asked "what would you like to do?" Install Ubuntu as the only operating system, alongside another os, or something else.

I chose something else as I wanted to format one of my old 100Gb IDE drives to serve as the partition to install ubuntu on. I formatted this drive with ext4 and made it the root directory for the installation, all ok.

I also have on a 1Tb SATA drive two partitions (splitting the disk in 2) one of these contains windows 7 and I did nothing to this drive (and was careful to do so)

After the installation finished the computer restarted and gave me no option for choosing operating systems?

what have I done wrong how can this be fixed? I would still like to be able to use Win7 for gaming.

Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated. :)

Answer 1

You say you have two drives. It seems as if your computer has given priority to the one containing Ubuntu.

Restart your computer and keep tapping F12 until you enter the menu with device selection for booting. From here, select the 1 TB drive and you'll boot into Windows.

If you want the computer to boot into Windows by default, you'll have to set the 1 TB HDD as the top priority boot device.

Answer 2

Try This:

Try opening a terminal and running sudo update-grub. It should mention finding a windows partition. If it does, then you will have the option to boot windows.

You may also need to set the timeout on the bootloader. See 'Setting the Timout' below.

If that doesn't work...

... we need to do a little more work.

Your windows install should be (hd1) to grub (since it should be the first BIOS drive that isn't the drive grub is running from). Press alt+f2 and paste this line:

gksu gedit /etc/grub.d/40_custom

After a password prompt, a text editor should open. Put this at the end of the text file:

cat << EOF
menuentry "Windows 7" --class windows --class os {
    set root='hd1'
    drivemap -s (hd0) (hd1)
    chainloader +1
}
EOF

(P.S: I hope the above is correct... I don't have a dual boot machine here for reference, so I'm going off of memory, /boot/grub/30_os-prober, and intuition I've gained from working with a lot of messed up boots. It won't break anything though. Worst case is the menu entry doesn't work.)

Then save the file.

Open a terminal, type sudo update-grub, and press enter

You will probably also need to set the timeout, as explained below.

Setting the Timeout

Press alt+f2 and paste this line:

gksu gedit /etc/default/grub

After a password prompt, a text editor should open. Look for a line with GRUB_TIMEOUT (it should be near the second line)

If there is a # character in front of it, remove that character. Make sure the timeout is set to 5 (or higher if you want. This will be how long you have to choose an OS before the default is used). The complete line should look like

GRUB_TIMEOUT=5

Now save this file, close the text editor, and open a terminal.

In the terminal, type sudo update-grub, press enter, and reboot.