Grub not recognizing Windows 7 after installing ubuntu

Question

I've spent the last two days trying to get grub to recognize my Windows 7 installation, to no avail.

The situation is as follows:

• I wish to dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu on separate 120 gb SSDs
• Windows 7 64-bit was installed first, on /dev/sda
• Ubuntu 64-bit 14.04.1 was then installed on /dev/sdb

After installing Ubuntu, I found that I was then booting straight into Ubuntu. Ended up running boot-repair to try re-install grub, which then gave me the menu on startup, but with only Ubuntu as an option.

I can now no longer boot into my Windows 7 installation, even when booting directly via BIOS boot settings (I end up getting an extremely descriptive 'boot0: error') message.

boot-repair info link is at http://paste.ubuntu.com/8982363/

Any help would be extremely appreciated!

Thanks

Answer 1

When I first installed Ubuntu in my desktop, I was also stuck in the same situation and so to have the Windows bootloader back, I booted my windows installation disk and launched the command prompt (Shift+F10) on the welcome screen after the keyboard language is chosen and typed this:

bootrec.exe /fixboot
bootrec.exe /fixmbr

This fixed the Windows bootloader back then and by using EasyBCD, I added the Linux entry (Grub2) back.

(It is mostly not required to mention the device to boot Ubuntu from because it is automatically probed. So Ubuntu being installed in /dev/sdb shouldn't be a problem)

Answer 2

Looking at your boot-repair file, you have identical dual hard drives inside your computer and you installed Windows on your first hard drive on your first partition (sda1) and Ubuntu on your second hard drive (sdb) using a GPT partition table with a VFAT EFI BOOT on sdb1 and "/" on the second partition (sdb2) and a swap file on sdb3.

You wanted to boot your Windows by doing nothing and taking the default boot order from your BIOS (sda) and boot Ubuntu by going into the BIOS and booting from your second hard drive (sdb)...

If my assumptions above are correct, and your Windows partition does not allow you to boot any more, it's really a Windows problem and you need to boot from the Windows CD and do a "repair" from there...

If my assumptions are not correct, please elaborate as I cannot see from the boot-repair file if the VFAT EFI partition on sdb1 was used by Windows for booting before you installed Ubuntu...