Grub2 can't boot Windows 7, doesn't even know NTFS

[Florian Sonnenberger]

Binary package hint: grub2

I have a SATA drive with the following partitions:
sda1 - (hd0,1) - ext4 with /boot from Ubuntu 9.10 Beta
sda2 - (hd0,2) - encrypted (Luks) LVM with swap, / and /home (both ext4)
sda3 - (hd0,3) - NTFS with Windows 7 Professional

Grub2 is installed in the MBR.
The Windows 7 bootloader is installed in sda3.

/boot/grub/grub.cfg is attached.
---

Ok, so Windows 7 can't be started from GRUB.

If I start the automatically added entry:
--->
menuentry "Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda3)" {
    insmod ntfs
    set root=(hd0,3)
    search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set aeccf515ccf4d893
    chainloader +1
}
<---
then grub displays: "error: no such device aeccf515ccf4d893" (triggered by the search line)
and i can get back into the menu.

If I start my custom entry:
--->
menuentry "Windows 7 Professional" {
    insmod ntfs
    set root=(hd0,3)
    chainloader +1
}
<---
then grub says: "error: out of disk" (triggered by the chainloader line)
Here I can also get back to the menu. So this should be errors from grub and not from the Win7 bootloader.

Grub gives me a "Filesystem is unknown" if I type "root (hd0,3)" in the command line at boot.
For "ls -l" I get: (don't know the exact wording as I can't reboot now)
--->
Device hd0: Partition table
    Partition hd0,1: Filesystem type ext2, UUID 24ce5eb7-90b3-4051-a0b0-93a280060964
    Partition hd0,2: Unknown filesystem
    Partition hd0,3: Unknown filesystem
<---
Btw, the module NTFS is loaded (It is listed by lsmod).
I don't really care why there is "ext2" in the first line. Ubuntu boots. No problem with that.
Second line is expected, because it's en encrypted partition.
But why isn't hd0,3 recognized as ntfs?

The same command in "grub-emu" running in Ubuntu:
--->
sh:grub> ls -l
Device host: Filesystem type hostfs
Device hd0: Partition table
        Partition hd0,3: Filesystem type ntfs, UUID aeccf515ccf4d893
        Partition hd0,2: Unknown filesystem
        Partition hd0,1: Filesystem type ext2, Last modification time 2009-10-11 02:05:03 Sunday, UUID 24ce5eb7-90b3-4051-a0b0-93a280060964
<---

I've found a bug in the Grub bugtracker that could be related to this one: http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?27069
No comments on that report yet.
http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?8252 could also be related. I'm not sure.

I'm posting this bug here (and not in the Grub bugtracker), because this way the chances that this bug gets fixed before 9.10 ships are better. ;-)

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Oct 11 18:30:06 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: grub-pc 1.97~beta3-1ubuntu8
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-13.43-generic
SourcePackage: grub2
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-13-generic x86_64

[Felix Zielcke (fzielcke)]

Am Sonntag, den 11.10.2009, 17:49 +0000 schrieb Florian Sonnenberger:
> But why isn't hd0,3 recognized as ntfs?

Thanks that you tried grub-emu first before reporting it.

The problem is that with some broken BIOSes the GRUB 2 LBA code doestn't
work. But for some people the code from GRUB Legacy would work.
With the alternative CHS which then gets used, you can only access the
first 8 GiB of a disk.
If you can find a BIOS update for your mainboard you could try if it
helps.

--
Felix Zielcke
Proud Debian Maintainer and GNU GRUB developer

[Florian Sonnenberger (nairolf)]

Updating the BIOS worked.
Thank you very much, Felix.

[Florian Sonnenberger (nairolf)]

This was a bug in my computer's BIOS, not in Grub 2.