Problems with bootloader (GRUB); 2 HD's, multiple OS's
 

Hello,

My desktop has two HD's, one SATA and one IDE drive. I've installed Windows Vista to the SATA drive, and I have Debian, Slack, and Sabayon on the IDE drive.

Both drives are 320GB. Windows has the full SATA drive of course. I have a 9GB swap area on the IDE drive, then the rest of the drive is split equally between Deb, Slack, and Sabayon.

All of the OS's are installed, but i've not been able to get more than one at a time to show up in Grub...for example, at one point Sabayon showed up, at another time Debian showed up, but at no time have Windows, Deb, Slack, and Sab all shown up.

Can someone please guide me on what configurations I need to look at from hard drive jumpers to GRUB settings to get things co-existing?

I have Super Grub Disk that I tried to re-install Grub to the MBR with and also tried the Live Swap feature as well that the disk recommends for Dual HD systems, but all to no avail.

Thanks for any help you can provide!

Just install Grub to IDE drive and configure BIOS to boot the computer from the IDE drive. Then use one of your Linux installations /boot/grub/menu.lst to list all your other OS's and install Grub to MBR from it.
After this all your OS's should work just fine.

I will give that a try when I get back home to the computer. As simple as that sounds i'm sure i'll make an adventure out of it. :)

Thanks!

1GB is usually more than enough for 'normal' use.

This usually happens when you install one distro and put Grub in the mbr, install a second distro and put its Grub in the mbr,...
You need to decide which distro you want to use to boot, just personal preference/choice. You then put entries for each distro in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file of that distro. You can find the entries for each by creating a mount point, mounting the partition and navigating to its /boot/grub/menu.lst and copying the entry from that distro to the menu.lst of the distro you wish to boot. If you're not clear on how to do this, post again.

I don't have any information on any of the distro's yet, so I will probably just re-install everything and skip the bootloader until the last distro since I don't have any preference on which distro boots.

I'll try that and post back afterwards.

Thanks!

i've now developed a new plan....try to simply get Debian working on one hard drive and vista on the other...we'll see how this pans out