Last night I installed Backtrack on an external USB drive plugged into my Vista laptop.
It works fine and the laptop now boots using Grub. The problem is that if I try to boot the laptop without the external USB drive connected I get this error:
GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 21
I tried to find a solution by googling around - read about the super grub disk and used it to remove the grub using this command
WIN => MBR & !WIN! :(((((((((((((((((
this just caused some diagnostic program to appear but I couldn't boot my Vista, so I then re-booted with SGD and used the command:
GRUB => MBR & !LINUX! (1) AUTO ;-)))
which then restored the grub loader as it was before - ie I still have to have the external USB drive connected.
Now I'm starting to feel way out of my depth. Please can someone help me just get my laptop to boot Vista without needing the external drive and (if possible) to boot the backtrack partition if and when the external drive is connected.
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Thanks very much for your response.
I typed bcdedit into the command prompt and I've attached a screenshot of the output.
What do I do next? thanks.
bcdedit
I hate to say it, but your bcdedit command returned perfectly normal and expected results, the problem therefore lies elsewhere. I've heard great things about EasyBCD in regards to easy editing of the bcd, go grab yourself a copy from http://neosmart.net/dl.php
Hi,
sorry for the delay - lots of work to do and this got pushed down the priority list. Now I've finally found time to read through and try out your suggestion.
Your tip to use the EasyBCD program proved successful. I had to read the help files for about 5 minutes to find the section about re-installing the vista bootloader http://neosmart.net/wiki/d
thankse very much for your help :)
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by: pjvogPosted on 2009-11-04 at 21:03:00ID: 25746900
Load up Vista with USB stick installed, open up a Command Prompt as administrator and type "bcdedit". XP and back used boot.ini to determine the boot order, vista changed that by using the bcd to manage faster booting.
Sounds to me like grub took the place of bcd for the bt boot, and since it's no longer in place, the system can't find it. So you've got to reset bcdedit : http://www.vistaforums.com
Or you could install grub and use it to boot vista.
title Windows Vista
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1
^ would probably work in the grub file, which would be edited through backtrack.
More on using bcdedit, the other way of editing this file is to use the recovery console, in windows Vista setup.