How to install and boot 145 operating systems in a PC

Quote:

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Originally Posted by lejepra

What should I do in order to make my first partition root?

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Don't!

That looks like a Dell/HP recovery partition. (Given the fact that there are tons of NTFS partitions, I'd suspect HP. They seem to steal lots of your disk for recovery junk.) There is no data from grub on that partition (unless you put it there yourself). The grub "root" argument tells it where to find its files (that is, menu.lst, stage1, *_stage1_5, stage2, etc.); if those files aren't on the partition you give it, it still won't install properly.

What you have to do is choose one of your Linux filesystems to hold the grub files (both of them probably already do, in /boot/grub); I'd choose the Ubuntu 8.04 partition myself. (That's sda7, or (hd0,6) to grub.) Then use that for the root command, not your hidden recovery partition that has no grub info on it. ;)

Saikee, I want to thank you so much for your lucid HowTo and your help in making the whole partitioning and grub work much clearer. Like others whose posts I've read here on this thread, I have joined this forum just because of the interest which your story and your HowTo has generated for me.

I have an older laptop (1999 Gateway 9300, celeron 433 mhz, 256 Ram) and am interested to slim down to something smaller and faster than the Ubuntu I've been running for the past year. I have an extra 10GB hard drive, and would like to put four small distros on it to test: Tinyflux, AntiX, Puppy Linux, and Fluxbuntu. I was thinking to keep the root and home folders of each distro in separate partitions, requiring a total of 8 for those plus one swap, giving a total of 9 partitions.

I was thinking to separate the root and home into separate partitions because many people have commented on the forums that it is more convenient as well as safer to have one's personal data separate from the OS. But I noticed that you seemed to put the home and root directories of each OS in one partition. Does that mean you do not subscribe to the idea of separating them? Or perhaps rather, that it was just too many OS's to separate the home and root for?

Do you recommend that I separate the home and root into different partitions, or keep them together? And do you think there is benefit in my putting grub into a separate partition the way you did? Or given the smaller nature of my project, is it just as good to just use the grub menu of one of the four distros to run the whole thing? Thanks!

Swarup ,

Welcome to Just Linux.

For maintenance purpose I prefer to keep each distro complete with its own set of /boot and /home. A common /home is doable but involves a lot of work because it keeps the desktop settings which can be different for different distros. So in theory it is a bad idea especially when you have to come up with the same user and group settings which each distro has a mind of its own.

I find it much better to have a data-only partition to store my personal information so that my photos, Word documents/spreadsheets, MP3 etc which can be used in any operating systems. Whatever I want to keep in /home I move it to my data-only partition. This way I can afford to lost any complete operating system without pain.

A common /boot does not work because every distro will dump its kernel and initrd files there and you will never know which kernel belongs to which distro even If none of them is overwritten. If you provide one partition per distro it will have /boot inside and so you can always identify the kernel and the boot loader just by the partition you’ve assigned to it. Thus if you install 4 distros you will have 4 boot loaders installed and any one can be “sourced” to take over the MBR to do the multi-booting.

My 145-system is a demonstration that every OS can be chainloaded. The only way I could show it is to put Grub in a data only partition because Grub has no master of its own.

Without an exception Grub must boot the Linux, that hosts Grub, directly by using “kernel” and “initrd” commands. It cannot chainload the Linux that hosts it because Grub will boot back itself in an endless loop. Think about it and you will understand. I described it as a dog chasing its own tail.

Putting Grub in a data-only partition does have the following advantages

(1) Grub is permanently available even if all Linux and other operating systems are removed.
(2) A Grub prompt is always available. One can learn far more about booting in a Grub prompt than working inside a Linux. Also there is no installed PC operating system in existence that cannot be booted up in a Grub prompt.
(3) One can use a MS Windows to boot up Grub if the data-only partition is a primary type. All it needs is to ask the MS Windows to make the primary data-only partition active. On the next boot the MS system’s MBR will fire up Grub instead of the Windows partition. That is something worth to have a go. The data-only partition needs to be one MS Windows supports like Fat16 or Fat32.
(4) Grub in a data-only is the easiest thing to set up. Just (1) format the data only partition, (2) Make a /boot/grub directory in the data-only partition, (3) copy stage1 and stage2 from a Linux into /boot/grub directory and (4) fire up a Grub shell and install Grub by command “root (hdx,y)” and setup “(hdx)” where x is the disk number and y is the partition number of the data-only partition. Thereafter a Grub prompt will appear in every boot. To control Grub one just write or copy a menu.lst into /boot/grub directory of (hdx,y).

I believe every Linux user will enjoy booting once he/she realise how simple the whole process has been arranged by Linux. Everything about booting I know was taught by the members and moderators here. So if you enjoy this thread you will enjoy Justlinux and the knowledge the members/moderators here are able to offer to you freely.

Thank you so much for your detailed and helpful reply. :) I think that on the point of /home and root architecture, I may not have been able to clearly express what I was planning: I was not thinking to create a single /home partition for common use by the four distros. Rather, I was thinking that there would be four separate root partitions (one for each distro), and four separate /home partitions (one for each distro). That gives a total of eight partitions i.e. "/" #1, /home #1, "/" #2, /home #2, "/" #3, /home #3, "/" #4, /home #4. Plus one swap for a total of 9 partitions. And I could add a 10th partition which would be a data partition housing personal data to be commonly accessed by all the distros.

In contrast, you are suggesting that I collapse the "/" and "/home" into one partition rather than having them in two separate partitions. In either case, each distro will have its own unique "/" and unique "/home". Just in the scenario I am suggesting, each distro will have its configuration settings in /home maintained separate from the root partition. Which gives the convenience I suppose, of being able to do a clean install or upgrade to a newer version of the distro in future, without having to save all the browser bookmarks and other settings from home, separately during the upgrade.

1. Do you feel it is worth creating separate unique home and root partitions for each distro as I have described above? Or is it simpler and better to just put each distro's root and home together in the same partition?

2. With regard to the single data partition where one will keep all word files, photos etc: What about one's mail folders for the email program? This is amongst my most important and critical data. Do you keep the mail data in the data partition as well, so it is accessed by all the distros using a same email program? And that way one could check and respond to email from within any distro, and the new email data thereby created would be accessible from within any of the four distros?

Or is that email data going to have to be kept in one distro's home folder. Let's say for argument's sake that Thunderbird is installed on all four distros. Can my TB profile folder be kept in the data partition and accessed by all? If so, then this would mean ALL my personal data is truly located in the data partition. And the only thing in the home folder would be the config files.

In reality the four distros do not come default with the same email client. But I suppose if I want to pursue a true separately maintained data partition in which all the personal data including mail and address book data would be accessible to all four distros, then the way to do it would be to install a single common email application such as TB, into each. Is that what you did, or what you would have in mind for the setup I describe?

(1) As I favour one partition per distro I would not be in favour just to create an extra /home for each one. The root partition of each distro is its /. In operation /boot and /home are always subdirectories of /. Since kernel 2.6.20 Linux no longer support 64 device names for a hard disk and we can only get 16 device names instead. Leaving the name of the hard disk and the extended partition one can have a maximum of 14 usable partition regardless the size of the hard disk.

In my own working when I mount a distro partition I can access every file it has. Believe me after a while you may have a job to tell which partition is holding what. In my case I keep a sheet of paper tabulating each distro's partition name. I could also look up Grub's menu.lst as I put the name of the distro and the partition reference there too.

If you want a lot of partitions you may have to go with LVM but the installers of the 4 distros need to recognise it first.

(2) I have not stored email extensively in Linux as most free email sites would do this for me, like hotmail, Yahoo and gmail. For work-related emails, which are in Windows, I have them stored offline in the hard disk and do backups regularly. I am probably not in a position to advise you how to pull different emails from different distros into a central location. May be the volume of my emails isn't large I find either hotmail or gmail is big enough to store all my emails permanently online.

My ISP is AOL and it also keeps all my emails permanently online.

Thank you-- that is very clear. I'll go ahead and keep the "/" and "/home" in the same partition. And as for email, I think I understand what to do. TB allows one to put its profile folder wherever you want, so all the distros could access it from the separate data partition. And other email programs probably do similarly.

There is only one issue that remains unclear for me, and that is that of setting up the boot menu in grub. Whether I use one of the four distros' grub installation wizard at the time of install, or whether I put in the lines manually into the menu.1st file later on, there is certain information one needs in order to have the three lines in the menu.1st file about each distro be accurate and work properly. THIS is what I need to know. --How to list the information correctly about each distro in the menu.1st file, so it will boot to each distro. (Last time I tried to do this, the Tinyflux grub installer did not get the AntiX listing correct and I could not boot into AntiX until I had the AntiX livecd redo grub from its own partition. Then both AntiX and Tinyflux would boot. But I'd rather use the Tinyflux installer so that that distro becomes the default distro to load.) I want to know though what information I need, and how to list it. It seems like one needs to know the kernel each distro uses, right? How do you find that out before installing it? Is there a place where one can go to copy the three lines for each specific distro, and then just paste it?

Add: I think I understand now. Someone told me on another forum that once all the distros are installed, I can use the working distro's grub to boot to that one and from there browse into each of the other distros' own grub's menu.1st file and copy the three boot lines from there into the grub install which I'm going to use. Is that the idea?

= = = = = = = = = = = = =

Also, if I should opt to do the grub in a separate partition as you detail below, there are a few steps there which are not clear yet for me:

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(4) Grub in a data-only is the easiest thing to set up. Just (1) format the data only partition, (2) Make a /boot/grub directory in the data-only partition, (3) copy stage1 and stage2 from a Linux into /boot/grub directory and (4) fire up a Grub shell and install Grub by command “root (hdx,y)” and setup “(hdx)” where x is the disk number and y is the partition number of the data-only partition. Thereafter a Grub prompt will appear in every boot. To control Grub one just write or copy a menu.lst into /boot/grub directory of (hdx,y).

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"Make a /boot/grub directory in the data-only partition": So I guess in order to do this, I need to boot up into a different HD. Then I connect this HD I am creating as an external HD, browse to the data-only partition, and creat a "boot" folder and then within that a "grub" folder. Is that the point?

"copy stage1 and stage2 from a Linux into /boot/grub directory": I don't know what this refers to. What is "stage1" and "stage2" and where do I get it?

The 4th step would need more step by step instructions for me in lay language. "Fire up a Grub shell" -- what does it mean? Where do I do that, and how?

"command “root (hdx,y)” and setup “(hdx)” where x is the disk number": So I would be executing all this from a terminal window in another HD, right? And the disk number I would get by seeing the disk # assigned to the external HD by gparted? But that disk number would change as soon as I install the new HD into the laptop.

You can write your own menu.lst or just edit any one from a selected distro.

Say if you have Linux A with Grub controlling the MBR then that Linux will be booted directly. The remaining Linux B, C and D can then be booted indirectly by chainloading each with 3 lines like

Code:

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title Linux B in partition (hd0,5)
root (hd0,5)
chainloader +1

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You can add the above line even before you install Linux B.

During installation you just make sure Linux B is installed into the 6th partition of the 1st hard disk or (hd0,5) and instruct its installer to put Grub (work equally well for Lilo) inside the root partition or (hd0,5).

After installation Linux B will become bootable. Just repeat the same for Linux C and D by specifying the correct partition number.

Regarding how to prepare Grub in a separate partition the current thread Post #3 has a full set of Bash commands listed. I copied and pasted them here

Code:

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mkdir /mnt/hda3
mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/hda3
mkdir /mnt/hda3/boot
mkdir /mnt/hda3/boot/grub
cp /lib/grub/i386-pc/*  /mnt/hda3/boot/grub
grub
root (hd0,2)
setup (hd0)
quit

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Commands in blue are issued in Bash root terminal. Those in red are inside a Grub shell.

Grub is just one of the many program you can run in a Linux terminal. To activate it you just type

Code:

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grub

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Once Grub is activated you will be working inside a shell. All the commands are to Grub's convention until you leave the shell by command

Code:

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quit

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and drop back to a Linux terminal.

stage1 and stage2 are all the Grub's system files needed to run Grub. For how I find it in directory /lib/grub/i386-pc/ I suggest you read Post #3 again. It is more rewarding if you try to think/understand the intention of every command.

At anytime you can ask Grub to tell you the partition layout by commands in a Grub shell

Code:

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grub
geometry (hd0)
geometry (hd1)
quit

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I think you are quite near to it. All you need is get yourself into a root terminal and try out a Grub shell.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by saikee

You can write your own menu.lst or just edit any one from a selected distro.

Say if you have Linux A with Grub controlling the MBR then that Linux will be booted directly. The remaining Linux B, C and D can then be booted indirectly by chainloading each with 3 lines like

Code:

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title Linux B in partition (hd0,5)
root (hd0,5)
chainloader +1

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You can add the above line even before you install Linux B.

During installation you just make sure Linux B is installed into the 6th partition of the 1st hard disk or (hd0,5) and instruct its installer to put Grub (work equally well for Lilo) inside the root partition or (hd0,5).

After installation Linux B will become bootable. Just repeat the same for Linux C and D by specifying the correct partition number.

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I see. So Linux A with Grub controlling the MBR, its entry in menu.1st is slightly more complex with an extra two lines (for kernel and initrd). While the remaining three distros-- Linux B,C, and D, will have only three lines: Title, root, and chainloader. Now the title-- can you make that whatever you want? Or is there a fixed convention by which the title is made? For example, you made as the title "Linux B in partition (hd0,5)". But here below in the entry for the hard drive I'm using now, it reads as below. There, there is no mention of the location of the distro in the title line the way you gave it. And the kernel is described in the title line, whereas in your example that is not done. So for the title then, can one put whatever one wants there?

Code:

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title                Ubuntu 8.04, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic
root                (hd0,4)
kernel                /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic root=UUID=372f0ec5-49da-4f2d-970d-550651cf9364 ro quiet splash
initrd                /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic
quiet

title                Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root                (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader        +1

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And for the "root" line, just the location of the root directory is needed. And there (0,5) means the 1st hard disk, 6th partition. How does this convention work: why does "0" mean the 1st hard disk, and why does "5" mean the 6th partition?

Then the term "chainloader +1" will always appear just like this for every distro Linux B,C,D, after Linux A?

(I am studying what you gave about how to put grub in its own data partition. The info is very helpful and I understand it better now, thank you.)

The "title" line is for Grub to display on the screen whatever you wish to tell yourself. As far as Grub is concern it is just a line of text it has to display.

Grub always counts from zero. So (hd0) is the 1st disk and (hd0,0) is the 1st partition of the 1st disk and so.

"Chainloader +1" means the current Grub will cut and discard itself from the 2nd sector onward and paste the remainder with another bootloader specified by the "root" statement at its "+1" (or the 2nd sector) position. In otherword Grub boots another boot loader and passes the control to the 2nd boot loader. It is a child play once you know it.

The beauty of chainloader is the 2nd boot loader does has to be Grub and can be any boot loader used on the PC. That is the magic and power of Grub. Chainloading is also used by every boot loader but not as well defined as in Grub.

Chainloading is used if Grub cannot read the filing system of the system it has been asked to boot. Therefore if you issue the "kernel" and "initrd" commands for a ntfs partition Grub can't execute them because Grub can't read its files. Also if the operating system has no defined kernel, like the MS systems, then the only way to boot a foreign system is by chainloading.

It is just not a widely known knowledge that Linux can chainload another Linux as most users and distro developers are used to do direct booting.

You don't have to use chainloading at all for Linux. Just copy the appropriate menu.lst section of the installed Linux B, C and D into the menu.lst of Linux A. Grub can boot every Linux directly this way.

In chainloading one boot loader boots another boot loader. It is simpler. The amazing thing of it is you can set up the menu.lst even before you install any of the systems as you don;t need to know their kernel and initrd names.

Thus basically you need one Grub to boot its master Linux A directly as indicated by the "kernel" and "initrd" of your Ubuntu.

Thereafter Ubuntu's Grub can chainload the next 200 operating systems if you install them.

The picture is a lot simpler than you think.

Wow. NOW it is all starting to make sense. What you wrote in your last post really put it all together for me. Thanks!

Now, in a previous post you had written, "During installation you just make sure Linux B is installed into the 6th partition of the 1st hard disk or (hd0,5) and instruct its installer to put Grub (work equally well for Lilo) inside the root partition or (hd0,5)."

My question is this: I was bad and did not follow the above guidance about "instructing its installer to put Grub...inside the root partition". Last night I installed the four distros onto my hard drive, each with its "/" and "/home" in the same partition as you instructed. Each of the four is a separate logical partition in my Extended partition (sda2). Sda1 is swap, and sda3 is my ext3 data partition. But I believe that the default for the boot loader in each distro's install was to set up grub in the MBR rather than in its own root partition. And I accepted that. Is this going to be a problem for me? Will I still be able to follow the shortcut way of adding Linux B,C, and D to Linux A's boot menu by the simple three-line (Title, root, chainloader +1) entry? Or will I have to instead "copy the appropriate menu.lst section of the installed Linux B, C and D into the menu.lst of Linux A". Or will neither of these two methods work, because of the fact that I let each distro's install default the grub setup to the MBR?

I would say out of a 100 Linux distros I could only name about 1 distro that has no otption to install the boot loader other than the MBR. So keep an eye on the installer like a hawk and you should find the facility!

In any case in a Grub shell you can put Grub back into its root partition, say it is (hd0,5) thereby making the partition "chainloadable" by commands

Code:

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root (hd0,5)
setup (hd0,5)

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In fact you can let each of the Linux A, B, C and D to enjoy the warmth of the MBR. Let say you have installed them in partition (hd0,5), (hd0,6), (hd0,7) and (hd0,8).

Assuming you want Linux A in (hd0,5) to control the MBR so have the menu.lst edited along the line I have suggested. You can then put Linux A in the MBR and Linux B, C and D chainloadable in one sweep commands of Grub as follow

Code:

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root (hd0,5)
setup (hd0)
root (hd0,6)
setup (hd0,6)
root (hd0,7)
setup (hd0,7)
root (hd0,8)
setup (hd0,8)

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I hope you now believe booting in Linux is child play!

Learn to use a Grub shell or Grub prompt and you can kiss all your booting problems good bye. The difference between the two is the latter is what you get before a Linux or any system is booted . Once Linux is booted you get only a Grub shell which is controlled by the kernel.

(Add: This post was written and posted before I saw the one from you just above. So all the work below was done while each distro's grub was still set to MBR and not root. But since the work was done using copy and paste of the original boot menu entry from each distro, then for the purposes of the work that was done below, I don't think it should matter.)

I went ahead and tried to set it up myself in the mean time, using the method of copying and pasting the entry from the menu.lst of each distro B,C,D into that of A. I got mixed results. Linux A is Tinyflux (a distro based on PCLOS), and that of course boots up fine. The other three distros are AntiX, Fluxbuntu, and Puppy 4.0 (their "frugal" install). Puppy also boots up just fine. Fluxbuntu tried to boot up for what I thought was an extraordinarily long time, and in the end gave an error message that the file system check failed. It then gave a command prompt, and said to type cntrl-D to reboot. I typed cntrl-D, and to my astonishment instead of rebooting, it completed its boot and immediately booted successfully! But even then, something funny is going on with it. I know, because when I first installed it and used its own grub to boot with, it booted fine. And finally, AntiX would not boot at all-- gave an error immediately "Bad file or directory type".

Here below is the menu.lst which I made (by adding lines to the Linux A (Tinyflux) boot menu):

Code:

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timeout 15
color black/cyan yellow/cyan
gfxmenu (hd0,5)/usr/share/gfxboot/themes/pcfluxboxos/boot/message
default 0

title Tinyflux
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=/dev/hda6  acpi=on resume=/dev/hda1
initrd (hd0,5)/boot/initrd.img

title failsafe
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=failsafe root=/dev/hda6  failsafe acpi=on resume=/dev/hda1
initrd (hd0,5)/boot/initrd.img

title AntiX (MEPIS at sda5, newest kernel)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda5 nomce quiet splash vga=791 resume=/dev/sda1
boot

title Fluxbuntu (Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic)
root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=304dc21f-1de9-49bb-8807-6fe85da66403 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic
quiet

title = Puppy (4.0)
rootnoverify (hd0,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 loglevel=3 PMEDIA=idehd
initrd /boot/initrd.gz

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So as I say, Tinyflux and Puppy both boot up fine. Fluxbuntu booted but with great delay and difficulty, and AntiX would not boot at all. (I know that all these distros boot fine to their own grub, because I tested them.)

Here is the error message given when I select AntiX from the boot menu I made:

Code:

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root (hd0,4)
File system type is ext2fs, partition type is 0x83
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda5 nomce quiet splash vga=791 resume=/dev/sda1

Error 2: Bad file or directory type

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It is odd, because the root location is correct, but the file system type is in fact ext3, NOT ext2. Don't know why grub is thinking it is of type ext2.

Here is the error I get with Fluxbuntu. After around 7-8 minutes of going through the motions of booting (Fluxbuntu doesn't show the actual lines of code--there is an image on the screen during the time), I get the following error message:

Code:

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fsck.ext3: unable to resolve 'UUID=9938fd2e-3823-4de1-8d38-9eef0263625d'
fsck.ext3: unable to resolve 'UUID=7970934e-390d-4842-9460-b4a1ba63cecc'
1 dev/sda8: clean, 16/47232 files, 28016/188755 blocks
fsck died with exit status 8                    [fail]
file system check failed
A log is being saved in /var/log/fsck/checkfs if that location is writable
Please repair the file system manually
A maintenance shell will now be started
[==> command prompt appeared]
Control-D to reboot system
[I did Control-D]
[Then the system proceeded immediately to the login screen after a fast show of several lines of code, and from the login screen went successfully to a functional desktop.]

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So what is wrong with the AntiX and Fluxbuntu grub menu listings? The listing is the exact replica of what I found in their respective root's grub menus. What do I need to do to fix this, so that all four distros will boot up properly?

From my experience with the Ubuntu family distros they like to fsck every partition you have got and so the delay isn't to do with the booting but let the distro to stick its nose into other partitions.

I usually have to go to the /etc/fstab to disable the partition-to-partition checking. I don't have the patience of seeing it to scan the 150+ partitions in my PC ( for the 145 systems). Many distros try to be clever and this is not always to their own good.

Your AntiX menu looks OK to me. What I would do in your case is to drop all the trimming and boot the system up manually by pressing "e" for edit on the AntiX choice. I would edit the entry as

Code:

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title AntiX (MEPIS at sda5, newest kernel)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda5 ro
boot

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or try "rw" intead of "ro" just to see if the distro boots.

You might have missed out the initrd statement there too.

In any case you can put Grub inside root partition of (hd0,4) and boot it up by chainloading. To do this at the boot up screen do not select a system to boot but just press the "c" key to drop into a Grub prompt. Then type these lines at the terminal

Code:

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root (hd0,4)
setup (hd0,4)
chainloader +1
boot

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The above is for you to boot AntiX with its own menu.lst in its original state as prepared by the installer.

If your AntiX has booted successfully when you installed its Grub into the MBR then the chainloading will fire it up.

The experience and expertise you have in this area is incredible. Whatever problem comes, you have the answer. Again, this last post you have given is marvelous. Such insight! I am making my way through your post, one by one dealing with the issues your raised. Here is the first one:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by saikee

From my experience with the Ubuntu family distros they like to fsck every partition you have got and so the delay isn't to do with the booting but let the distro to stick its nose into other partitions.

I usually have to go to the /etc/fstab to disable the partition-to-partition checking. I don't have the patience of seeing it to scan the 150+ partitions in my PC ( for the 145 systems). Many distros try to be clever and this is not always to their own good.

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After looking at the concerned fstab file, I am sure you are correct about this. Here I am pasting for you the file. Can you look at it and tell me how to disable the partition-to-partition checking.

Code:

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# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>  <type>  <options>      <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc          proc    defaults        0      0
# /dev/sda7
UUID=304dc21f-1de9-49bb-8807-6fe85da66403 /              ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro 0      1
# /dev/sda3
UUID=772e77f7-1e6f-4474-bc33-7b5fe8843eb5 /media/sda3    ext3    defaults        0      2
# /dev/sda5
UUID=9938fd2e-3823-4de1-8d38-9eef0263625d /media/sda5    ext3    defaults        0      2
# /dev/sda6
UUID=7970934e-390d-4842-94b0-b4a1ba631ecc /media/sda6    ext3    defaults        0      2
# /dev/sda8
UUID=9b33370d-b246-487d-a470-f05121874f49 /media/sda8    ext3    defaults        0      2
# /dev/sda1
UUID=193e5b03-3cc4-44bd-9e20-158467acae8b none            swap    sw              0      0
/dev/scd0      /media/cdrom0  udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec 0      0
/dev/fd0        /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto,exec 0      0

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Do I have to turn something "off" in this file, or do I have to delete those lines related with other partitions? Or comment them out with "#"? If so, exactly which ones? What should be done?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by saikee

Your AntiX menu looks OK to me. What I would do in your case is to drop all the trimming and boot the system up manually by pressing "e" for edit on the AntiX choice. I would edit the entry as

Code:

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title AntiX (MEPIS at sda5, newest kernel)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda5 ro
boot

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or try "rw" intead of "ro" just to see if the distro boots.

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Ok. I'll try it and see how it goes.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by saikee

You might have missed out the initrd statement there too.

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Actually, I went back to confirm again and in fact there is no initrd statement in the AntiX entry. Don't know why.

Add: Actually, I'm just going to do the setup for chainloading AntiX as you suggested. That seems the easiest and the surest shot.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by saikee

In any case you can put Grub inside root partition of (hd0,4) and boot it up by chainloading. To do this at the boot up screen do not select a system to boot but just press the "c" key to drop into a Grub prompt. Then type these lines at the terminal

Code:

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root (hd0,4)
setup (hd0,4)
chainloader +1
boot

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The above is for you to boot AntiX with its own menu.lst in its original state as prepared by the installer.

If your AntiX has booted successfully when you installed its Grub into the MBR then the chainloading will fire it up.

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I tried to do this just now. I started the computer, and at the grub menu I typed "c". The letter "c" appeared in the lower right of the screen, but nothing happened. No Grub prompt appeared. So I thought, maybe I need to hit "enter" in order for the "c" to process. I hit "enter", but when I did that, grub just booted to the default OS-- Tinyflux. And that's where I am now. I thought, while I'm here I'll see if I can get the work done in terminal. So I opened a superuser terminal window and opened grub. (I can't figure out how to copy and paste from the terminal/grub window into this post, so I'll have to type out what happened. [How do you paste from this terminal window?])

In the grub shell I typed

Code:

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root (hd0,4)
result came: filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
setup (hd0,4)
result came: checking if "boot/grub/stage1" exists .... no
                        checking if "grub/stage1" exists ... no
                        Error 2: Bad file or directory type

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What happened? Why couldn't I do the work at the grub boot menu screen? And why couldn't I do it once booted into Tinyflux, in the grub shell?