Booting Windows from a non-first Disk with GRUB

1-minute read

As you probably know Windows can only be installed on the first hard disk, but furthermore it can only boot from there. I struggled with this recently while configuring GRUB. I was actually quite confident that my config file was correct (remember grubs naming convention which starts with zero so hd(0,0) refers to the first partition on the first disk) but Windows just didn’t boot.

And so I googled for a possible reason and found this FAQ entry. My machine has /dev/hdc reserved for linux while /dev/hdd belongs to a Windows 2003 Server so my entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst now looks like this:

title Windows 2003 Server
   map (hd0)(hd1)
   map (hd1)(hd0)
   rootnoverify(hd1,0)
   chainloader +1
   makeactive

Since grub doesn’t count dvd and cdrom drives, in my system hd0 points to /dev/hdc and therefore hd1,0 refers to /dev/hdd1.

Shuting down / rebooting the system with a grub menu entry

I personally find it quite useful to have an entry to shutdown or reboot the PC available in the grub menu, because from time to time it happens that I just want to eject a cdrom without actually starting the operating system so these comes in handy.

title shutdown
halt

title reboot
reboot