Can't access Windows Vista - boot menu

[N4RPS]

Hello!

The fact that GRUB did not detect your Vista partitions does NOT sound good. Go to the main menu, select System > Create System Report, open the created report, and copy-and paste the FDISK portion of the report
into the reply. This will tell us whether or not your Vista partitions still exist. Here is what mine looks like:

FDISK:

Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders, total 234441648 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000d593a

  Device Boot      Start        End      Blocks  Id  System
/dev/sda1  *        2048      206847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2          206848  188299263    94046208    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3      188301312  230438030    21068359+  83  Linux
/dev/sda4      230438912  234440703    2000896  82  Linux swap / Solaris

If you don't have something similar to this, you might have a problem.

Sadly, people just starting out don't know that when it comes to carving space out of a Windows install to put Linux on as a dual-boot setup, it's better (at least for ME, anyway) to make one's own decisions about where everything is going to go. I could just be paranoid, but I just plain distrust some of the auto-install features in Linux distros.

Gold_finger has posted some excellent stickies onto the forum about the finer points of partitioning...

73 DE N4RPS
Rob