Installing Grub or Lilo - A common Question
 

Hi there,

I have 5 internal hard drives and an internal CD-ROM drive. I have the Slackware DVD iso version 12. On my machine I've installed Slackware, Debian and of course dreaded Windows XP, which had to be re-installed last as it started being awful.

For those newbies out there (like me) I can inform you that in an Extras folder on the Slackware DVD/CD is a install-grub or grub-install package, I also know that before anyone can access their CD-ROM they need to mount it. But blow me down if I can't figure that one out.

I tried this one:-

mount -t auto /dev/hdr /mnt/cdrom

I get the error

mount: mount point /mnt/cdrom does not exist

Ok, so my CDROM doesn't exist or should be something else, but what?

As there are literally THOUSANDS of hits in google about this problem and a lot of them saying, first get a floppy????? Yeah I'm old enough to remember 5 1/4 inch floppies and MS-DOS in the 80's. (LOL)

AS A COMMUNITY what would be absolutely ideal is for someone to create a bootable CD-ROM image that scans all your hard drives, detects the operating systems that are in place and then gives the user the option of using either GRUB or Lilo and installs it for you.

The reason? I've been without Linux since I installed it 2 weeks ago, my time is precious and I don't have a lot of it to scour through forums. But I am paitent and in todays society especially with Windows and Mac OS, linux needs to have NOOBIES solutions if it's going to continue gaining the ground. I believe that the community has lost a lot of potential mum and dad installers who have resigned themselves to windows because they had to re-install it wiping over the MBR.

Mind you, I'd make this project myself if I knew a little bit more about what I'm doing, but I don't, I'm a NOOB.

But until then, if anyone could give me a hand with some instructions, that would be GRAND.

The easiest way is to install winblow$ first that way it gets detected and added to the boot menu. Surely your cdrom should be hdc?

mountpoints...
 

First off, all that error message means is that there is no such folder /mnt/cdrom, so first do mkdir /mnt/cdrom
as far as an automatic grub, just install linux <after> windows, almost all popular distros automatically set up grub for dual booting, I don't know for sure but I believe doing grub-update or update-grub once it's installed will do that for you

btw:
as far as fixing this issue, google is your friend, it took me literally 10 seconds to find this
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351 so all you need is an ubuntu live cd and it will do it all automatically.

also, as much as the community tries to be helpful, people who act like they're speaking with paid tech support i.e. "My time is too precious to use a search engine and find the answer myself." tend to not get a lot of help.