WTF, GRUB cannot boot VISTA, HELP!!!

Lol, I've gone completely round in circles for a week now and I need
help desperately.

My system is

Intel QUAD
3GB RAM
2x360 GB SATA
GTS 8800 SCC

So it came with Vista installed and I finally added linux to it after
much faffing about with many different distro's, until I finally came
back to suse again :)

They all had various problems with either my graphics card or drives,
whereas suse does it all, at least once I loaded NVidia's driver ;)

Now my disk layout is

drive 1 - part 1 - OEM installation/recovery
drive 1 - part 2 - VISTA

drive 2 - part 1 - /boot
drive 2 - part 2 - swap
drive 2 - part 3 - /
drive 2 - part 4 - /home

So now I have this problem which I just cannot solve. I have
reinstalled VISTA and linux numerous times and I have installed GRUB
numerous times to the MBR of the first drive but nothing works.

GRUB will boot linux just fine but when I select the windows option it
shows the 2 lines from the grub menu relating to the vista boot, i.e.

rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader (hd0,1)+1

but it does not boot the o/s, it just hangs at that point and I cannot
even use <CTL><ALT><DEL>. I have never seen this before but have
google'd and seen loads of posts with this same error but I cannot see
a clear solution in there at all.

I installed grub using this command

grub-install --root-directory=/boot /dev/da

and there were no errors.

Can anyone tell me in simple terms how I solve this or at least tell
me if it is simply not possible, which I don't believe for one moment.

Another thing that may be a factor is this. cfdisk keeps telling me
that the /dev/sda drive partition table is corrupt, even though fdisk
seems to say it is okay. I have recreated this partition in the VISTA
install but it still says this???

freedom:~ # cfdisk -P t /dev/sda
FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 1: Partition ends in the final
partial cylinder
freedom:~ #
freedom:~ # fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 360.0 GB, 360080695296 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 43777 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2f96e6d3

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 1045 8393931 27 Unknown
/dev/sda2 * 1046 43778 343244800 7 HPFS/NTFS

What's going on?

TIA
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Dual Boot Instructions
    ... I ended up reinstalling Vista, ... The boot SECTOR is not the bootLOADER. ... finds the partition table for that HDD and sees that the first partition is ... violated, we no longer can simply install WinXP, install Vista and ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.vista.hardware_devices)
  • Re: Installing 7 and drive Letters
    ... Now Vista and Win 7 both recognize Partition names and letters as the same. ... I forgot how to change how many seconds you have to select Vista or Win 7 on Boot. ... So if you've used Vista to assign the letter E: to the first partition on your second HDD, you can point Setup to that partition. ... "drives" are assigned LETTERS. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.vista.installation_setup)
  • Re: Dual Boot Instructions
    ... WinXP Setup WILL "corrupt" the Vista boot SECTOR. ... On the next reboot, when the system finds the HDD currently designated as the boot device and looks at the first physical sector, it finds the partition table for that HDD and sees that the first partition is Active so it reads the first physical sector of that partition. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.vista.hardware_devices)
  • Re: Installing 7 and drive Letters
    ... Now Vista and Win 7 both recognize Partition names and letters as the same. ... I forgot how to change how many seconds you have to select Vista or Win 7 on Boot. ... So if you've used Vista to assign the letter E: to the first partition on your second HDD, you can point Setup to that partition. ... "drives" are assigned LETTERS. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.vista.installation_setup)
  • Re: Installing 7 and drive Letters
    ... So decide which letters you want to use; boot into Vista and use Disk Management to create and format the volumes and assign those letters. ... So if you've used Vista to assign the letter E: to the first partition on your second HDD, you can point Setup to that partition. ... "drives" are assigned LETTERS. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.vista.installation_setup)