Comment 3 for bug 424992

I have adopted a solution to this problem that involves the use of Grub4Dos. When installing Ubuntu, I use the "advanced" button on the last page of the install process and tell the installer to install grub on the root partition of the new linux installation.

Once the installation is finished I reboot and in the windows environment copy the file "grldr" to the Windows boot drive (usuallu C:) and add a line 'C:\GRLDR="Start GRUB"' to the boot.ini. That's it. When I reboot the XP bootloader has the option to start GRUB. On choosing that option, grub4daos magically finds the installed menu.lst file and you can boot into Linux.

When Windows is re-installed, restoring the ability to boot into linux is as simple as copying grldr to the Windows boot drive and adding the line to boot.ini again. For Vista the approach gets a little more involved since the new BCD file has to be edited but someone has written a little batch file that will do the edits for you. It's all in the README_GRUB4DOS.txt file that comes with grub4dos.

It would be nice if ubiquity could automate all of this for us but, I don't know if the need for this is really widespread. Also the process for Vista/Windows7 does not lend itself to automation since adding an entry to the Vista boot menu involves interacting with Vista's BCDEdit utility (A horrible little piece of software IMHO) and hence must be done from the Windows environment.