Triple boot?
 

Hi all!

I have installed Linux Mint 9 within Win XP and have installed an additional HDD as a Slave on the same IDE cable as my DVD drive.

I installed ubuntu on to the additional HDD using the live CD and when I try to boot the computer I am greeted by two versions of GRUB?! First version appears to be the one that comes with Mint and so asks me to boot either Windows or Mint, when I select Mint I get ubuntu's version of Grub, it asks me to boot one of three OS's; here's where it gets weird:

Top of screen says:

GNU GRUB Version 1.98-1ubuntu5-1mint2

If I select Win, it boots fine. If I select Mint it boots fine however if I select Ubuntu it says:

error: no such device
error: file not found
error: you need to load the kernel first

I pressed "e" within grub and was faced with this:

insmod ntfs
set root ='(hd1,1)'
search --no floppy --fs-uuid --set f6422203421e479
loopback loop0 /linuxmint/disks/root.disk
setroot =(loop0)
linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.3-21-generic root =dev/sdb1 loop=/linuxmint/disks/root.disk ro quiet splash
initrd/boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-21-generic

Can anyone help me? - you may need to use layman terms while I break free from Microsoft! :D

Thanks in advance

If I need to gather more info from my setup please let me know what is needed to help reach a solution :)

Thanks for the help and feedback, you are sooooo helpful toward newbies!

/sarcasm

Not a bad question, but not easy...

On this forum are those who are willing and those who are quick and knowledgeable, but of those who are all of these and available on a Sunday with the information you seek, there are few.

Patience rather than insistence will serve you best here.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...Ask_a_Question

However, if I were to guess, I would think that you might try having the bootloader for Ubuntu chainload the the other combination of bootloaders, that is have the system boot Ubuntu first. A simpler solution might be to triple-boot the operating systems instead of having the one linux within Windows.

It might help if you posted your partition table with the results of "fdisk -l"

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then hit ctrl-x to boot, If it works run updates in Ubuntu then reinstall grub Don,t know if it will work but something to try.
Another option is to boot into linuxmint and reinstall linuxmint grub to MBR and see if it picks up the ubuntu distro.

For what it's worth - to avoid problems exactly like the one you are having, I do my multiple boots through the bios. My bios lets me select which drive I want to boot. You might want to see whether you have this option also. It does not solve the problem of dealing with the bootloader on the drive - but drives are so cheap ( 2 40 gig for $15 on ebay) that I only put 1 opsys per drive. so simple and painless. In your situation it would eliminate the double boot. Op sys would take you to one drive and software bootloader would take you to the desired partition.

I suspect ubuntu is one of the later versions that uses grub 2 which will not mix with grub legacy (grub 1.98). You can boot these several ways but the easy way for me is to chainload all the distros using legacy. The main reason for using legacy is that is what I started with and have not changed. I am not familiar enough with grub 2 to offer you more information.