Hello People

Firstly must say that this is a really good forum. This is my first post so here we go. Basically I have a laptop (yeah good for me lol) compaq presario 2500. I have WinXP on it. What I wanted to do was install Redhat 9.0 and SuSe9.1. I Used partition magic to partiton the hard drive 40gb (1st partition winxip 18gb, redhat 10gb, SuSe 10gb, Swap 1gb, Vfat 1gb in this order).

I installed Redhat on the second partiton hda5 it went all fine (obviously had to cofigure the nofirewire issue on boot up and pcmcia issue on shutdown using this forum great got it fixed. Everything fine there WinXP and RH9 boot up and work sweet.

The problem I am having is when I loaded SuSe I selected the third partition hda6. The install went well. When getting to the GRUB menu and select WinXP or RH9 they are fine and boot up but when booting SuSe I get an error

'Boot Partition'

Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition ... and the it prompts to
'press enter to continue...' and goes back to the grub menu.

This error means the following

Error 17 : Cannot mount selected partition
This error is returned if the partition requested exists, but the
filesystem type cannot be recognized by GRUB.


So what I did is loaded RH9 and mounted the SuSe filesystem and go and look into grub.conf and menu.lst files and they both seem fine, when i go into RH9 grub file it does not have the SuSe information at all.

But here is the thing it uses the SuSe grub menu. The way i know this is the options it gives me at the menu, there are 4 options

RH9
WinXP
SuSe
Memory Test

(In this order)

The last 2 options are not in the RH9 grub file so I know it is not using the RH9 grub (and also I installed SuSe 2nd and so that would have NOT overwritten but defaulted to the SuSe Grub.

So how do I fix this error 17 problem?.

-------------------------

Also Now when I load RH9 it comes up with errors on Boot. It goes something like this

something vfat [failed]
(perhaps iptable or kernel needs to be updated).

iptables-restore -h iptables-restore --help
(perhaps iptable or kernel needs to be updated).
[failed]

I have to obviously do something to the kernel as this needs some updating.

Hope somebody can help me.

Cheers

Guys..........and Gals

I have not failed. I have just
found 10,000 ways that don't work

From what you've posted here, it sounds like you installed RH and installed RH's grub to the MBR, then, when you installed SuSE, you did the same thing, installed SuSE's grub to the MBR. There is only one MBR, and you can only have one instance of a bootloader, so SuSE is it. The two files which will make or break your attempts to boot WinXP, RH, and SuSE are SuSE's /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab. The problem probably lies in eithe/both of those files.
Post the contents; maybe we can help.
As an option, if you can boot into RH and reinstall grub to the MBR, you would have to edit RH's grub.conf and possibly /etc/fstab to recognize SuSE.

here is the info for fstab


LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5, mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda8 /windows vfat defaults 0 0
/dev/hda7 /swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0

What does your grub.conf look like?

You should have something resembling:

title Suse
root=(hd0,1)
kernel ...
title Redhat
kernel (hd0,2)/boot/... root=/dev/hda3

etc.

sorry here is the grub file

the thing is it uses the grub from the suse partition as the grub menu is that from SUSE. So I have to mount the pratition and will get the grub.conf and menu.lst

#modified by YaST2. Last modification on Thu Jul 15 15:00:10 2004




colour white/blue black/light-gray
default 1
timeout 8
gfxmenu (hd0,5)/boot/message


###Don't change this comment - YaST2 idemtifier: Orignal name: Linux###
title SuSe
kernel (hd0,6)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 vga=0x317 splash=silent desktop resume=/dev/hda7 showopts
initrd (hd0,6)/boot/initrd



###Don't change this comment - YaST2 idemtifier: Orignal name: windows###
title Windows
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1


###Don't change this comment - YaST2 idemtifier: Orignal name: Linux###
title RedHat
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5 vga=0x317 splash=silent desktop resume=/dev/hda7 showopts
initrd (hd0,5)/boot/initrd


###Don't change this comment - YaST2 idemtifier: Orignal name: Linux###
title Memory
kernel (hd0,6)/boot/memtest.bin

Hi,
I had this problem recently. I did this on my suse 10 command prompt :

mkdir /boot/new
mkinitrd -k /boot/vmlinuz -i /boot/new/new-initrd

Then edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to give the new-initrd's name on

"initrd <initrd name>" section

Reboot and it works fine !