BleepingComputer.com: Repair Vista In A Tripleboot Enviroment With Grub Bootloader.

Hi. Due to a problem with my vistainstallation (http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic114679.html) I'm considering a repairinstall. I don't want to mess things up. Right now I have Grub as bootloader. What will happen if I would make a repair of my vistainstallation. Is there anyone who has some experience about this. I'm running a tripleboot and I installed the OS:s in order XP, Vista, Ubuntu.

I have the same setup, but on OS on one of Three drives and My Vista drive crashed after some heavy
read write operations on the part of Gutsy. It is unclear if this is due to the poor NTFS driver in
gutsy or whether this is happenstance.

Have you noticed any sounds/grinding coming from the drive with VIsta on it?

RandomUser, on Nov 4 2007, 11:16 PM, said:

No, I have not noticed any unusual sound on my drive. It sounds like you are having your OS:s installed on different drives. I have them on the same drive (different partitions)
I presume that you don't have the problem with windows features as I have on my vistainstallation ? (http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic114679.html)
Can you check this and verify that it's working for you?

I believe even with a Repair install of Vista you will have to repair Grub since the Windows installer like to overwrite anything else on the MBR. Follow the instructions left in this thread http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic113835.html namely posts 2 and 3 and you should be ok.

As for RandomUser's HDD issue it is a bug in Gutsy that I can only assume is being worked out as we speak. (oddly enough most Ubuntuers who I have spoken to have not mentioned it are complaining about low battery life in their laptop or have had fried a drive because of it. Possibly a SATA issue? since it mainly seems to happen in Laptops).

Hi Blackspyder and thank you for your input. I'll try to repair vista with startup repair, if that doesn't solve my problem, I'll try to do a repair using the upgrade option. To restore the Grub bootloader seems pretty straightforward.Let you know how it goes.

Success Tried the startup repairoption first by booting from the vistadvd, but it said everything was ok, so I booted into vista and tried the upgradeinstalloption, and yes, that fixed the windows feature and updateissue in vista. After that I had lost the Grub bootloader, only xp and vista, so I followed the links provided by Blackspyder to restore Grub, so again. Thank you Blackspyder for pointing me in the right direction.

Your very welcome. Glad to have you up and running again.