Problems setting up a MultiOS boot with two harddrives
 

Hi everyone,

I hope this is the right forum for this question.

I want to set up a MultiOS boot with two harddrives:
- sda for windows, there are 6 partitions on this harddrive:

- sda1, primary for windows installation

- sda2, extended partition containing sda5 to sda8 for various purposes

- sdb for linux, right now there are 6 partitions on this one:

- sdb1, system reserved from windows (i'm really not sure what this is for :()

- sdba2, primary for ubuntu root

- sdba4, primary for debian root

- sdba3, extended partition containing:

- sdb5, Mageia root

- sdb6, swap

- sdb7, /home (for all linuxes)

At first I didn't want to set up a MultiOs system at all which is why I didn't pay attention on how to do this right from scratch. So now I have various problems:

1. Installed Ubuntu at first, grub is located on sdb. From this grub menu I can boot into Windows, Ubuntu and Debian. But Debian installed it's own grub on sda, which only can boot Ubuntu and Debian but NOT Windows. Normally this doesn't cause any trouble because I have set sdb as the primary boot option in bios. But now I want to configure my MultiOS system properly so I want to remove grub from sda.

2. After installing Mageia the grub menu on sdb started behaving weirdly. I use Grub Customizer to edit the grub menu to my needs. Since installing Mageia, there appearing too many items for booting Mageia. I'm not speaking of one main item and a sub-directory containg additional options like recovery mode or older kernel versions. The grub menu now looks like this:

- Mageia 4
- Mageia 4
- Mageia 4
- <... following round about 6 other mageia entries>
- Windows 8.1 ( starting with this entry the list is mostly like I want it to be)
- Mageia 4
> Additional options for Megeia
- Mageia 4 (NO recovery, older kernel versions or something else was added ...)
- Ubuntu 14.04
> Additional options for Ubuntu (everything ok in here)
- Debian 7.5 Wheezy
> Additional options for Debian (everything ok in here)
- Memory Test (memtest86+)
- Memory Test (memtest86+, serial console)

I have tried using Grub Customizer to remove the redundant Mageia entries, but they keep reappearing.
How can I get rid of this?
Additionally, I can't boot into Mageia. Instead, an error message occurs concerning driver issues. I don't think this has to do anything with grub problems, but I will check the exact message and post it here, too.

I hope my description was comprehensible :redface: and there is a solution to my problem.

Regards :)

You have a lot going on and you may just have to re-install. I'm not sure if you will be able to re-partition what you have.

What size HDD's are you refering to? (128 GB, 500 GB or 1 or 2 TB)

(if you have 2TB HDD's I am not good with GPT partitioning, sorry)

-:-It might be the Windows Recovery Partition-:-

Please post that exact error-

Did you change/modify the Mageia partitions?

Run the fdisk -l as 'root' and post the output so we can read through what partitions you have.
(post and put in code tags) Click on the (#) sign and right click in between the the code tags to do so-

I don't understand how System Reserved got put on sdb. Did you install Windows with both drives connected?

I don't know with certainty but I am suspicious that if a Raid Array may have been to blame for System Reserve to be bumped to sdb:-?

Oh dang I hope I didn't fubar my system :(

First things first:

1.

sda is 2TB, sdb is 250GB large.

2.

Display Driver Issue
==============
The display driver currently configured requires you to use the nokmsboot boot option to prevent the KMS driver from being loaded in the boot process.
(I had to look it up because I have it displayed in german but I didn't want to bother you with translation errors. Source: https://forums.mageia.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=1971
"Original" message:
http://www.directupload.net/file/d/3...7nedzh_jpg.htm

3.
4. Yes I installed Windows with both hard drives connected. sdb is my old hard drive, I hade Windows XP installed on it before installing Windows 7 on sda. I guess Win 7 just left the reserved space on sdb. This would explain why I can't use sda to boot into Windows. (I can't tell if had Win XP installed while installing Win 7 or if I deleted it beforehand. I am completely sure I had all my data on sdb, then installed Win 7 on sda and then migrated all data to sda. After this I completely whiped sdb.)

5. No sda and sdb are connected via sata separately and I didn't set up a raid mode.

It would help if you posted more detailed information. The bootinfoscript, which you can download from the site below, when run will output a results.txt file which will have information on drives/partition and boot files which should point in the right direction.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bootinfoscript/

That explains it, windows will only create a new SystemReserved if it doesn't detect it other than that it will overwrite the existing. The only problem I can see is if sdb goes bad your Windows recovery tools will be gone too. Or if you remove sdb windows is no longer bootable. If I used 2 drives the wins drive would have it's own bootloader & sdb would be grub. In fact I would've just kept windows on 250Gig drive as sda with MBR untouched, then put linx on the other drive along with grub. sda appears to be all windows how much of the drive is it taking?

Ok I ran bootinfoscript. See attachments for results.txt.

sda is 2TB big and the paritions are taking up the whole space (but there is free space in those partitions). I installed Win7 on sda because I wanted to have one hdd for linux and one for windows. If I had known about the reserved space I would have disconnected sdb before installing Win7 on sda ... Is there a way to migrate the recovery space to sda?

I believe that it is possible but it's not like linux, you would have to remap the drive.

If you don't mind me asking; where did the Boot Info Summary 'default to' after you ran the bootinfoscript?

The instructions link in the Description box takes you to a new page which indicates it will be in the same directory from which the script was run.

http://bootinfoscript.sourceforge.net/

Thanks!

The results.txt was "defaulted" (what a nice verb :D) into my root directory.

I'm not 100% sure why this happened. I placed the script file into my root directory
using nautilus I ran using sudo. After this I closed nautilus and ran the script using sudo.

Using sudo grants temporarily root acces so the script was able to place the file into the root directory right?

Yes but you can still read it with

Oh I had no problems reading it. I was just wondering if I understood what happened :D

So, is there a solution to my problem?