Problem No boot with users computer

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I have a user who has come to me for help, I am pretty sure I have the solution I just wanted to see what you guys thought.

The user dual runs Windows 7 and Debian, he used partition magic to create a new partition from the space that it freed up (no reason given for why he did this).

GRUB gets loaded but it stalls at the OS booting screen and the system will boot perfectly fine with the Live CD.

However loading from the hard drive the system just stalls trying Windows or Linux.

I have tried a repair install of Windows 7 however it says there is nothing wrong.

When booting to Linux this measage appears Memory: 4059460k/4980736k available (2228k kernel code, 132280k reserved, 1081k data, 392k init) There is only 4GB ram in the system.

I have tried swapping the ram about and trying new dimms which has the same result.

I tried a CMOS reset which resulted in the system rebooting on its own 3 times before loading GRUB.

I have also ran the hard drive makes diagnostic utlity which revealed nothing wrong with the hdd and this leads me to believe that the MBR has became corrupted during the resizing and creation of the new partition.

Do you think I am correct in assuming that? or is there anything else I could try?

 

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Has it ever worked as i am pretty sure you have to have Linux installed first if you are to dual boot Linux and Windows due to bootloader requirments.

 

Didn't think of that I will ask him.

 

Really? That's news to me - and the twenty or so dual-boot systems I've set up in the past

 

do you think his MBR is fooked?

 

if you turn off AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) in the BIOS will it allow you to boot?

Have you tried restoring GRUB?

 

It's possible to do it either way round.

 

Yes , i think you need to restore the grub mbr.

after you install windows you have to restore the grub mbr.

Grub2 will be different but i expect its using a legacy version

 

Tried restoring GRUB but no luck, I'll see what AHCI does when I get home.

 

Yep - sounds like it

 

thats what I thought as everything else I tried should have sorted it.

 

What process did you use to restore grub?

 

just with the boot disk as normal, don't know if there are any other ways.

 

So once you loaded up the disk what did you do i.e issue a command like boot=/dev/hda1 or manually edit file etc etc

 

Sounds like you need to fix the grub config to me.

Hardware probing can change device / volume Id's if you change the system in terms of drives or partitions.

 

I did manually retype the GRUB menu settings.

 

Yeah but did you pick the right Id's for the partitions ? They have probably changed.

 

Have a shoofty over here

 

Sparky your approach will allow booting into windows but will kill grub and stop it being a dual boot machine.

You can also then run Bcdedit.exe, but as far as i'm aware the windows boot loader only supports variants of windows.

Thomas has the correct idea, either use a tool or recovery CD or boot off the linux live CD and then fix the config in linux manually.