Grub does not see the Windows 7 partition

[Guest]

Hi everyone...

First i must apologize for my bad english but i'm portuguese.

My desktop has two hdd: sda - SATA (1.0TB) and sdb - IDE (80GB). Before installing Kubuntu i only had Windows 7 in sda. During the installation i choose to use the entire IDE disk to Kubuntu... in the end it did not ask me where to install grub. Since i has told that GRUB recognizes the Windows partition and creates the menuentry automatically i rest upon that.

After reboot i noticed that GRUB boots directly to Kubuntu and not even a menu appears to show wich options i've.

I must also recall that in my BIOS the first hdd is the IDE where Kubuntu is now.

My question is: what's necessary to force GRUB to see the Windows partition and create a menuentry to show each time the desktop boots?

[Qqmike]

Well, it sounds like you might have the "older" BIOS+MBR system, not the newer UEFI+GPT. I never had experience with IDE drives and GRUB, but they can throw a twist into things. It doesn't matter now. Fact is, bottom line, Joao, if it were me, I'd try a couple simple commands; if that failed, I'd try Boot repair. Like this:

Try the commands -->

Boot into your Kubuntu.
Open Konsole (a command-line terminal), probably here: K > Applications > System > Terminal (Konsole).
Try these commands, type each one and press Enter after each:

sudo grub-install
then after that finishes with a success we hope, do this:
sudo update-grub
which will generate a new boot configuration menu which we hope will detect and include your Windows. That, my friend, is the theory. It should do the trick for you.

If that fails ...

try Boot Repair, follow this:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair
It works as a live CD or USB flash drive -- instructions are there.

[vinnywright]

After reboot i noticed that GRUB boots directly to Kubuntu and not even a menu appears to show wich options i've.

if you are not seeing the grub menu at all ,,,,,,first try ,,,,,,taping the shift key when you power up the computer ,, if grub installed with the "hidden" option it will not show unless it detects the shift key and their is a narrow window between startup and booting when this will work .

you can post your /boot/grub/grub.cfg and we can see if windows is detected or not .

VINNY

[Qqmike]

Good idea, Vinny. With just one OS, the default often is "no menu" (unless you hit Shift), which implies it didn't detect two. But given how buggy these things (GRUB) can be, it's possible.