Dual-boot Debian Squeeze and Windows 7

Question

I had Windows 7 on my system, after which I installed Debian Squeeze. However, grub doesn't show my Windows 7 in the boot menu.

How can I fix this problem?

Solution 1

I had Ubuntu 8.04 and then installed Debian 6.0. I did not have to configure the menu list - it just went right the first time.

After a few days I saw the menu item for Ubuntu was not present on the boot screen. Following some research on the net I found a good command that solved my problem:

Open a root terminal and type:

update-grub

This command is a utility provided by Debian to automatically generate the grub.cfg file that detects the file systems and adds menu entries accordingly.

Solution 2

Check if you have package os-prober installed. It should be able to recognize Windows automatically.

It's very inconvenient to configure it on hand every time grub or kernel packages are updated.

Solution 3

The first answer doesn't work. Debian 6 uses Grub 2, not Grub 1, so there is no menu.lst anymore, this is replaced by grub.cfg file.

The file /etc/grub.d/10_linux is wrong in Debian 6. My solution was to grab this file from an Ubuntu 10.04 installation. I just replaced it and after that ran update-grub (could also be grub-update, typing this in Win XP...) as root. After that a new /boot/grub/grub.cfg was created and I could boot both Windows 7 and Debian 6!