Adding Fedora Core 4 to my Grub Menu
 

Hi,

I have a pc with a Pentium III with one IDE 40 GB hard disk and one SCSI 9 GB drive.

I've installed Suse, Mandriva, Ubuntu 5.10 & Fedora Core 4, in that order on the pc. Suse Mandriva & Ubuntu are on the IDE hard disk with separate partitions. They all work fine. (Actually after I installed Suse & Mandriva, Mandriva messed up the boot loader, but then Ubuntu's install fixed it.)

When I installed Fedora Core, I chose not to install GRUB as it was already installed in the boot partition of the IDE drive. Fedora installed fine on the SCSI drive but GRUB doesn't have any information for it to boot to Fedora

I can get to the GRUB configuration file from within UBUNTU but I don't know what syntax to use to add Fedora Core 4 to the menu. First of all, I don't know how to find out what the Kernal # is for fedora core??? Secondly I'm not sure how to specify the SCSI drive, partition, etc.

Thanks for any help you can give me on this.

Below is part of my menu.lst file which shows excerpts for booting Ubuntu, Mandriva & Suse:

title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.12-9-386
root (hd0,3)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-9-386 root=/dev/hda4 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.12-9-386
savedefault
boot

title Mandriva linux (on /dev/hda5)timeout X_seconds
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5 ro acpi=ht resume=/dev/hda6
splash=silent
initrd /boot/initrd.img
savedefault
boot

title SUSE LINUX 10.0 (on /dev/hda2)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 vga=0x31a selinux=0
resume=/dev/hda1 splash=silent showopts
initrd /boot/initrd
savedefault
boot

I'm not 100 percent but I'll give it a shot. Always make backups of your config files before making changes.

To find out what kernel is loaded, at a console type, uname -a to view info about kernel along with other info.

I believe scsi should be listed as sda, so if Fedora is on the first partition of the scsi drive it should be sda1. In grub I assume it would be:

title Fedora
root (sd0,0)
kernel=/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1


Something along these lines should work. I don't have scsi so I can't say for a 100 percent if its right but someone will come along and offer better advice.


If you can get into Fedora, look at / and /boot to see if the vmlinuz file is there and the initrd file. Set those up like the others in Ubuntu's grub list.

Hope this helps.

The best solution for you would probably be to fire up the FC CD, and get into recovery mode. I'm guessing it would be "chroot /mnt/sysimage", then do a reinstall of grub into your root partition.
Quick search here on LQ will find threads with the needed commands.

This will create all the entries you will need without trashing your current grub environment - just cut and paste into your "real" menu.lst.
Repeat for any later installs - KISS works best.

Steps for a user who want to use Grub to boot 40 instead of 4 Linux

let say hda3 is an installed Linux but not yet bootable

Boot up the Linux that has its Grub in MBR. The file to be edited is always /boot/grub/menu.lst. Edit it with the following 3 lines addition at the rear of the file.

title My Linux in hda3 - Grub counts from 0 so hda3= (hd0,2)
root (hd0,2)
chainloader +1

save the file. Make a temp. directory, mount device hda3 on it, change root to it, install its boot loader in root partition, exit and reboot

mkdir /mnt/hda3
mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/hda3
chroot /mnt/hda3 <----------------you are now inside hda3
grub-install /dev/hda3 <--------- if the Linux has Grub or
lilo -b /dev/hda3 <-----------if the Linux uses Lilo
exit <------------------- Now you are back to the original bootable Linux
reboot


Just keep repeat the above 39 times and change only the reference hda3 and (hd0,2) for each partition holding a Linux.

A cleaver bugger would amend, change root to, install boot loader in root partition and exit back for all 40 Linux in one go before doing the reboot.
-------------------------

Would the person who suggests the above do such thing himself?

No never!

I would partition my hard disk into 40 partitions first, then edit my Grub's /boot/grub/menu.lst with lines

title empty partition in hda1
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

title empty partition in hda2
root (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

title empty partition in hda3
root (hd0,2)
chainloader +1

title empty partition in hda4
root (hd0,3)
chainloader +1

and so on until I hit partition hda40. (actually I would generate the /boot/grub/menu.lst entirely by a Visula Basic program as it isa loop of repeating something 40 times, to save typing)

Whenever I install a Linux I just tell it to install its boot loader in its root partition. So every one of the 40 Linux will be bootable immediately after the installation.

If I am in a good mood the I edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst to change the title line to reflect the name of the Linux.

People should not touch a computer if they are not interested in a lazier way to do things.

root@portable:/boot/grub# fdisk -l
cannot open /proc/partitions
root@portable:/boot/grub# grub-install /dev/hda6
/dev/hda6: Not found or not a block device.


hmm, interesting linux distros don't like other distros, just like windows not liking linux...

What do I do know?

The system is:
Windows (hda1) (have installation cd)
Ubuntu (hda6) (have livecd only) -lost after fedora wrote to mbr-
Fedora (hda9) (have installation cd)

towsonu2003,

To me it is the opposite. You will see in the second last link in my signature that my Linux like each other and happily living together with all types of Dos and Windows.

You must be able to get "fdisk -l" working. It seems to me you may not have the root privilege. So try to "su" at the terminal supply the root password to become the superuser or preceed the commands with "sudo".

You should be able to log in as root with Fedora but Ubuntu, being a true Debian, disallows a root login to the Desktop resulting some system-related commands switched off to the ordinarary user logins.