I’ve got a multiboot system with Windoz in the first drive and first partition like everyone recommends. I have several distro’s and just let them install their bootloaders, but always on hd0 mbr. I installed Debian 5.0.1 this way and it wouldn’t boot, so I got SGD to “fix” it, which it said was successful, but all I get is a partition doesn’t exist when I try to boot. I put Debian on /dev/sdb3, I loaded Linux Rescue and mounted sdb3 and verified that its menu.lst had the right boot numbers (hd1,2). fdisk even showns /dev/sdb3 as boot as shown by the asterisk under the boot column. Should I do a complete reinstall of grub, maybe using one of the other distro’s as the holder of grub?:\ At one time they did all the grub launching as each addition was made.
BTW, Windoz I can get to boot using the “fixed” grub menu, but who cares? I never use the piece of $#@*.
Just let me know if you need a fdisk dump or whatever.
What I have are a collection of distros strung all over two disks.As I added distro’s, I just let the distro add the boot loader it was installing, but made sure that it was using the mbr of hd0 where my Windoz and first distro (Karmic 32) exist.
BTW, the whole disk (hd0) is occupied by Windoz and Karmic. I then started adding disto’s on my second drive, one right after another and the grub menu’s would change of course, but everything would boot. That is, until I added Debian 5.01.
It appeared to load like all the other distro’s, but on it’s first attempt at booting it acted like it didn’t exist (the partition doesn’t exist message error 22). I then used Super Grub in an attempt to fix that boot problem and it appeared to work since it said “SGD Succeeded”. When the grub menu came up, if you selected the first entry (usually the default), Debian didn’t appear, but once again I got the error 22. Trying again, I picked the Windoz pick and it booted fine. Using Linux Rescue I mounted the partition in question and made sure that the menu.lst was pointing to the right partition and that everything else looked in order.
So what I have are several distro’s and Windoz that won’t boot from the grub menu given to me by SGD and so I want some help to restore grub on one of the distro’s so that it recognizes all of the partitions that are now on my two disks. I hope this isn’t too confusing.
I’m pretty good with Linux, but I still have problems with grub especially now that grub2 is in the mix. You can throw some pretty complicated Linux info at me and I’ll probably will be able to follow your logic, but if it involves grub I slow down.:shame: I understand mounting and chrooting, etc and always use a disk such as Linux Rescue or Finnix to do all my work so as not to bother the existing partitions on my internal hard drives.
I know this isn’t an OpenSuse question directly, but all the forums my questions don’t even get a “huh?”. They invariable involve multibooting which most people consider just one drive and Linux riding behind Windoz. I like to try out all the distro’s and that used to be pretty easy until grub2 along. I’m sure grub2 is fine, but I just need a little help understanding how to enable everyone to get along without conflicts.:\
That seemed to work so I’ll do the update if I can get the Karmic to boot from this point because I think the update won’t take affect without me being chrooted.
Good news and bad news. Good news is that the grub menu is back and working apparently. I didn’t take time to try out all the options, but I couldn’t get into Karmic in gui mode. I went to recovery mode and did the update and that worked fine, but once again nVidia is screwing up my xorg.conf file and I can’t get in. This I’ve handled before, but it is likely to take several hours to resolve. In the meantime, thanks for all the help and I’ll let you know if the other distro’s work.
All my distro’s were working except Debian 5.0.1 so I gparted it and did a new update-grub2. Karmic still has a bad xorg.conf, but I’ll have to figure out how to get it back. Ever since they had the 190.53 update, I have had nothing but trouble. Thanks again for the help on grub.