mandrake booting from suse's bootloader
 

Hello?

I'm trying to boot Mandrake PowerPack 10.1 from
SuSE 9.3 Pro's GRUB boot loader.

Basically, I've installed Mandrake's default boot loader
in the MBR (LILO with Graphical Menu) first and reloaded
SuSE's GRUB boot loader in the MBR.

Prior to this boot loader replacement in the MBR, I recreated
Mandrake's original boot settings in SuSE's boot loader
configuration. But, this doesn't work.

I don't know what I've done wrong.

I'd appreciate if anyone could comment on this.

Thanks.

Let's have a look at your grub.conf or menu.lst

Hi homey,

Here's how the Mandrake is called from SuSE's GRUB:

root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz acpi=ht resume=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 splash=silent
initrd /boot/initrd.img

Mandrake's kernel and initrd images have some long names including
the kernel version, but the above rather seemingly simple names are
symbolic links to the longer versions.

That is, /boot/vmlinuz actually points to /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8... and /boot/initrd.img
points to /boot/initrd-2.6.8... I don't exactly remember the actual longer kernel
image name now.

This shouldn't matter, does it?

Thanks.

As long as the vmlinuz and initrd links are pointing to the real thing, they should work just fine.
If the Mandrake is really on /dev/hda5 , then it should work.

The closest example of Mandrake that I have handy is for PCLinuxOS and it looks like this in a grub.conf.

title PCLinuxOS
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.11-oci5.mdk ro root=/dev/hda1
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.11-oci5.mdk.img

Yours might work if it looked similar...

title Mandrake
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda5
initrd /boot/initrd.img

Hi homey,

Great! Adding "root=/dev/hda5" in the kernel option makes
booting Mandrake from SuSE GRUB work.

I thought "root (hd0,4)" line has the same effect without
the explicit "root" kernel option.

Thanks.