Problem:

I was installing Ubuntu 10.10 on my old laptop lately in dual boot mode with Windows Vista. I simply could not boot into Windows though I could easily boot into Ubuntu. After going through a number of Ubuntu forum threads, I figured out that it might be a problem with Grub and thus I decided to reinstall Grub. But update-grub did not detect Windows and displayed a message like this:

  ls: cannot access any_path/boot
  Boot: No such file or directory

Reason:

The reason which I found (on SourceForge) is that Grub2 was installed with Windows system partition chosen as the root-directory. This causes the folder /boot/grub to be created on the Windows system partition. Since ntfs partitions are case insensitive this leads to confusions between “/boot” and the already existing folder “/Boot”

Solution:

Boot into your Linux OS and deleted or rename the folder /boot on the Windows system partition. Make sure that your don’t delete the /Boot folder. The /Boot folder contains the file “bcd” which is necessary to boot Windows Vista/7.

This solution worked for me flawlessly. Hope it works for you as well. Feedback, suggestions and questions are welcome. Enjoy

Sources: Ubuntu Forums, SourceForge.

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