After installing debian 6 on my laptop along with windows 7 64bit , my laptop only boots to debian what should I do?

Question

I've installed Debian 6 32bit on the same HDD but different partition along with Windows 7 64bit, and now my laptop only boots to Debian 6 where I want both Windows / Debian.

How can I edit GRUB to show both windows and debian?

Answer 1

Look in /boot/grub/menu.lst, there is an example setup with windows on the first disk first partition (hd0,0) and Linux on the first disk second partition (hd0,1). Beyond that you see the active entries. If windows is on the first partition, your active part should look similar like this:

title         Windows 7
root          (hd0,0)
chainloader   +1

title         Debian Linux Default
...

(Don't modify the Linux entry)

With the next boot it should appear in the boot menu.

Answer 2

It looks like you might have corrupted your Master Boot Record - open up the terminal and run the following commands:

terminal-prompt>su
//you will be asked to give the root password
terminal-prompt>update-grub
//grub will once again take a look at the OSs on your HDD
//it will probably find the windows install this time

That's it! If it works, Grub will tell you it found Windows 7. Then you simply need to restart and boot to windows :) I suspect the above will also work with sudo update-grub but I did not try that...