can pick which OS to boot from

[zenyora]

so the last time i had ubuntu installed i was able to pick which os i want to run ..but now after doing a full reinstall on both os it automatically boots into windows without promoting me to which os i wan to boot ..i have 2 drive each set as a master one is ata and the other is a sata if that helps...any idea how could i fix this ?
thanks

 

[Slaxter]

Well, I would look into using Lilo. Lilo is something that I use for Slackware, it prompts you with the question of which partition to boot from. I'm not sure if you will be able to simply install it, but look into it.

 

[tajahem]

If you installed Ubuntu first and then Windows I would guess that Windows probably overwrote grub with it's own boot manager that doesn't see Linux distributions. I would try reinstalling Ubuntu or more specifically grub.

If, on the other hand, you installed Windows first and it is still experiencing this problem you might check that having both drives set to master isn't causing a problem.

 

[zenyora]

i actually installed windows first then installed ubuntu..each is installed on its own drive and they are both set to master ..i doubt that that is the problem as i had it installed like that before ....iam kinda new to linux so iam not sure how to reinstall grub ......though i did some research and found a solution which is using GAG as a boot manager yet i really don't want to do that....any other options?

 

[BoysNightOut]

How do you have 2 Master HDD's? That doesn't work. Is one SATA and one IDE you meant?

Umm...I would install Windows first on the primary HD if that's what you want as your primary OS. Then just freshly install Ubuntu on the second HD. It should prompt you automatically upon boot-up.

Okay so, I would make sure you don't need a Master/Slave setup. I've actually run this setup also with same OS's and never had a problem when installing Ubuntu on a 2nd HDD after I had XP on my first one for a while.

 

[tajahem]

I would guess that either you don't have GRUB installed on the hard drive that is checked first, or you have problems with your GRUB config.

If during the inital stages of the boot it does not at any time mention that it is loading GRUB it is probably the first problem. The easiest and safest way to fix this would be to reinstall Ubuntu making sure to answer yes if it prompts you to install GRUB to the first hard drive.

If it is the second problem you will have to boot a liveCD and edit the file /boot/grub/menu.lst . There are a number of different things that could cause this problem, but two causes that I can think of would be a zero second timeout before selecting the default option or a hiddenmenu option. Reinstalling Ubuntu will get you a default menu.lst as well.

Hopefully something in that is helpful, if not maybe someone else has a suggestion.

BoysNightOut: I'm fairly certain that in this case ATA = IDE

 

[Nitestick]

How do you have 2 Master HDD's? That doesn't work. Is one SATA and one IDE you meant?

there are two IDE channels, each can have a master drive: Primary Master and Secondary Master.

If it is the second problem you will have to boot a liveCD and edit the file /boot/grub/menu.lst . There are a number of different things that could cause this problem, but two causes that I can think of would be a zero second timeout before selecting the default option or a hiddenmenu option. Reinstalling Ubuntu will get you a default menu.lst as well.

this sounds the way to go. if it doesn't work it could be that the boot flag in your partition table editor is against your windows partition (no idea why this would have changed itself) and it could be changed to the partition with GRUB/LiLo installed with a partition editor.