How to add Vista/Windows 7 partition to Grub 2 (Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala)

Today I decided to give Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) a try. I’m using my old laptop for testing purposes. At the moment I have there Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.04 installed and I can use them both with dual booting. I had no vital documents on my Ubuntu partition so I decided to do a clean install. Karmic Alpha 2 was just released and compared to Alpha 1 it was now using GRUB 2. Install went smoothly with no particular issues so I booted to Karmic and messed around a bit. Then logged off again rebooted, ready to use Windows. Imagine my surprise when there was no boot to Windows option in GRUB.
Here’s what I did to add it. I booted up to Karmic again. Now I only had 1 hard drive, but several partitions. I needed to find out which one was my windows partition. To do that I started a terminal and used the following command:

# sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

According to this my Windows partition is hda1. To continue with my plan to add Windows boot option I typed in the following line:

# sudo nano /etc/grub.d/11_Windows

This created a new a new file. I then added the following lines:

#! /bin/sh -e
echo “Adding Windows” >&2
cat << EOF
menuentry “Windows 7” {
set root=(hd0,1)
chainloader +1
}
EOF

Now save the 11_Windows file.

Bare in mind that in earlier version of GRUB, if your Windows was installed on first partition then you need to give root=(hd0,0). Thats how GRUB used to number partitions. Starting from GRUB 2, you need to give root=(hd0,1), if your Windows is installed on first partition. So under GRUB 2 it looks like this:

First partition (/dev/sda1): root=(hd0,1)

Next type the following command:

# sudo chmod a+x /etc/grub.d/11_Windows

Next type in the following command:

# sudo update-grub

You should be able to see something like this:

# sudo update-grub
Generating grub.cfg …
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.30-9-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.30-9-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.30-8-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.30-8-generic
Adding Windows
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
done

Now close all the open programs and type in the following command to your terminal:

# sudo reboot

If all went well you should see Windows 7 option in your GRUB2.

-Eric