Installed suse now cant boot into Red Hat

treschen · 01-24-2010, 01:49 AM

Hi guys

Please help. I initially had Red Hat 5 on my pc on my primary 40 hard drive, then i added a second hard drive as a secondary master and went on to install suse on it, now when suse boots it doesn't even give me the option to boot red hat, i did not touch any of the partitions on the red hat hard drive during the suse installation. Is there hope ???

PS: I am total Newbie when it comes to linux

Thanks

vinaytp · 01-24-2010, 02:16 AM

Hi treschen...

Try this..

1. Boot the machine with SUSE Linux
2. Try to find where RHEL's /boot partition is mounted. i.e.,For eg:

Code:

[root@vinay firefox]# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x61290840

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        6374    51199123+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2   *        6375        6387      104391   83  Linux
/dev/sda3            6388       19457   104984775    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5            6388        8998    20972826   83  Linux
/dev/sda6            8999       11609    20972826   83  Linux
/dev/sda7           11610       14220    20972826   83  Linux
/dev/sda8           14221       14481     2096451   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda9           14482       19457    39969688+  83  Linux

3. From above output my boot partition is mounted on /dev/sda2..I believe your RHEL installation is on /dev/sda and SUSE installation is on /dev/sdb

4. mount the drive and check for vmlinuz and initrd files

Code:

mount -t /dev/sda2 ext3 /mnt

5. Check the files vmlinuz and initrd under /mnt and add them properly in grub.conf file as shown below

6. Now Add following lines to /boot/grub/grub.conf file

Code:

title SUSE Linux 
        root (hd0,1)  # hd0 is first harddisk, 1 is 2nd primary partition
        kernel /vmlinuz.*.*
        initrd /initrd.*.*

7.reboot the machine

Hope this helps....Do revert back if the issue persists....

Cheers !!!

ronlau9 · 01-24-2010, 03:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by treschen

Hi guys

Please help. I initially had Red Hat 5 on my pc on my primary 40 hard drive, then i added a second hard drive as a secondary master and went on to install suse on it, now when suse boots it doesn't even give me the option to boot red hat, i did not touch any of the partitions on the red hat hard drive during the suse installation. Is there hope ???

PS: I am total Newbie when it comes to linux

Thanks

What file system did Red Hat 5 use ?
Is it ext3 or or ext 4
As opensuse still use GRUb 1 it can not read ext 4
in that case it is better to use Red hat GRUb , but than you have restore Red hat GRUB.

treschen · 01-26-2010, 01:02 AM

Thanks alot guys,it is ext3, i will try it out later today.....