I should start by saying that the latest Ubuntu is GREAT. The startup time puts Windows to shame (what exactly is Windows doing for all that time?) and wireless connectivity works flawlessly.
However, I got an unpleasant surprise when I installed it on my Acer laptop. The some reason, GRUB 2 mis-detected my Windows partitions and thought that the hidden recovery partition was the main Windows installation. When I attempted to boot into this partition, I got an unfamiliar Acer screen and, worse still, the Ubuntu partition was completely destroyed! (By completely destroyed I mean that GParted showed the partition as being unallocated.)
After re-installing Ubuntu and reading the GRUB 2 documentation, I came up with the following solution:
1. Disable the os-prober - this is the script that detects the windows partitions and adds them to grub.cfg. You can do this by simply adding the following option to /etc/default/grub:
GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER="true"
2. Put a modified version of the windows menu entries in /etc/grub.d/40_custom - see here for more details.
3. Run update-grub - this recreates the grub.cfg file. In fact, grub.cfg is updated every time there's an update and that's why you should never edit it by hand.
Dual boot restored!
Monday, 10 May 2010
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