[imomushi8]

so i have windows vista and ubuntu 7.10 installed, and just recently the vista partition disappeared from the boot menu. from what i can tell using ubuntu's terminal, the partition containing vista is "busy." im thinking a problem occurred during vista's last shutdown.

i have a recovery partition for vista, but the only thing i havent tried is the option to reinstall vista.

i hear theres a "startup recovery" feature on the vista installation disc, but i didnt get a disc when i bought my laptop.

so i have a few questions:
1. do you think startup recovery can fix the problem?
2. is there any reason i would not want to use startup recovery? (will it affect dual-boot? is there a reason they didnt put startup recovery on the recovery partition?)
3. am i going to have to buy a vista installation disc, or is there somewhere i can download just the startup recovery feature?

thanks in advance. and sorry for the long post.

[Elvandil]

What were you using as a boot manager? GRUB? If so, you should be able to edit GRUB to include Vista.

There is no separate version of Startup Repair, and there is no telling what it might do if it does not recognize the Ubuntu partition. It may wreck your partition tables sufficiently that you will need to start from scratch.

On the other hand, Startup Recovery may fix your Vista installation at the expense of Ubuntu.

[imomushi8]

vista was showing up in the grub menu up until that point.

do you think "startup recovery" would be able to fix the fact that vista is "busy?"

how likely is it that it would wreck my partition tables? at this point, id be willing to sacrifice ubuntu, but i NEED my vista stuff to be okay.

[Elvandil]

If you are willing to sacrifice Ubuntu, then I'd go with the Startup Recovery. Vista will try to save Vista-related things first. If it fails, then you can still recover data from the partition by other means before repartitioning the whole drive.

I don't know enough about GRUB to tell you how to restore Vista to the menu. If you want to give that a try, post a note in the 'Nix forum.

[imomushi8]

as it turns out, there was just an error when updating one of the ubuntu files.

a quick text edit fixed the problem.

thanks anyway!

[Elvandil]

Good work.

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