Brian Henk

Booting to Windows Recovery Partition with GRUB

I installed Fedora on my ASUS 1001P netbook recently and was unsuccessful in getting wireless working. I was careful not to delete the Windows recovery partition for this scenario, so imagine my surprise to see Linux booting when I hit the recovery key. Here’s how I booted to the Windows recovery partition in Fedora (but it probably will work in any distro):

1. Find your Windows recovery partition

Boot into Linux like normal. We’re looking for a FAT32 partition that is about 10 gigs for this particular model.

[bhenk@gee grub]$ sudo sfdisk -l

Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 0+ 25- 26- 204800 83 Linux
      start: (c,h,s) expected (0,1,1) found (0,1,27)
      end: (c,h,s) expected (25,127,37) found (86,63,36)
/dev/sda2 26 18148 18123 145572997+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda3 18149+ 19454- 1306- 10485760 b W95 FAT32
      start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,127,37)
      end: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,127,37)
/dev/sda4 19454+ 19456 3- 17760+ 1b Hidden W95 FAT32
      start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,0,1)
/dev/sda5 26+ 280- 255- 2048000 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 280+ 18148- 17869- 143524863+ 8e Linux LVM

/dev/sda3 looks about right.

2. Make the GRUB menu pop up on boot

Fedora doesn’t show the GRUB menu on boot by default. Comment out hidemenu and set a reasonable timeout (I picked 30 seconds).

[bhenk@gee grub]$ sudo vi /boot/grub/grub.conf

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
#    all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#    root (hd0,0)
#    kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/mapper/vg_gee-system
#    initrd /initrd-[generic-]version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=30
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
#hiddenmenu


3. Add a Windows Recovery menu entry

The real work is in adding a menu entry for Windows recovery. We need to set the device to boot off of using the notation (hdX,Y) where X is the number of the physical disk (starting at 0) and Y is the number of the partition (starting at 0). Since the recovery partition was /dev/sda3, we’ll use (hd0,2). I added the following to the bottom of the file:

title Windows Recovery
   rootnoverify (hd0,2)
   chainloader +1


4. Reboot, and select Windows Recovery!

2011 Fiesta Sync Technical Details

I had trouble finding some technical details on sync features when I was buying my car. Hopefully someone finds this helpful. I’ll try and keep it updated if anyone has questions or I think of something else.

My primary concern was with playing music. Sync can play music from a bluetooth device, USB device, or simply line-in. USB is definitely the way to go. This is the only way to use many voice commands, such as “play artist” or “play playlist”. Here’s what I’ve found as far as USB support:

• FAT32 formatted USB device (Mass storage) works – I use a 32 gig flash drive (not all the way full)
• MTP probably works – My Scandisk Sansa Clip works
• Will play mp3 files at any folder depth
• Plays standard m3u playlists with relative paths
• The playlist will not play if any entry is invalid