I always have trouble getting a linux dual boot to work. I have a dual drive set up with Suse on one drive and it's boot loader grub on the front of that drive. I unplugged suse and installed Mepis 6.0 on the second drive and put grub on root. I went back into Suse (Mepis uplugged) and added Mepis to the boot loader in Xen and put Mepis's kernel #2.6.15-26-386 in the kernel slot. It doesn't work when everything is plugged in, nothing will boot. If someone could help me I'd sure appreciate it. Please dumb it down if you can help, I been using Linux for 4 years and I always screw this up.

So now you can't boot anything?? If you can boot Opensuse or have the Live CD, run 'fdisk -l' command as root (sudo in Ubuntu) and post the output. Make certain both drives are plugged in. Do I understand correctly that you have Opensuse Grub installed to the mbr on its drive?

It might be useful to also go to the grub prompt and run these commands and post the output:

geometry (hd0)
geometry (hd1)
find /sbin/init
find /boot/vmlinuz

The only thing I can do is guess at your hd and partition arrangement. If you put grub into the / root partition of Mepis then you should be able to chainload it by using this entry in your boot/grub/menu.lst of Suse

title Mepis
root (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

I see you have windows listed also and if it is on this second drive the root (hd1,0) is probably wrong.

Just leaving for dinner---see if the "booting" link below is any help.

# Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Fri Aug 29 11:24:18 PDT 2008
default 0
timeout 8
gfxmenu (hd0,1)/boot/message
##YaST - activate

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title openSUSE 10.3
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_WDC_WD800BB-55J_WD-WCAMDA770235-part2 vga=0x317 resume=/dev/sda1 splash=silent showopts
initrd /boot/initrd

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: floppy###
title Floppy
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader (fd0)+1

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe###
title Failsafe -- openSUSE 10.3
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_WDC_WD800BB-55J_WD-WCAMDA770235-part2 vga=normal showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off noresume nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 edd=off 3
initrd /boot/initrd
This is my boot menu. Now I can't get into "bootloader" from yast control. I get this error: "No such client module bootloader. Run 'yast2 -h' for help on usage

I can boot opensuse from it's own drives mbr as long as the other drive is unplugged. If I plug them both in nothing will boot. Windows is gone. I wiped it and installed Mepis on it's drive. I don't have the 'Live CD' and can't boot from the CD or else I could boot with both plugged in and repair the bootloader, until now.

Why remove the disk? Either let the installer for the second distro add an entry in grub for both, using the correct drive locations; or don't install grub during the second installation, boot up into SuSE, and add an entry for Morphix. When you pull a drive and put it back in later, one installation or the other will have bad entries in /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab. Another advantage is that the second distro will notice the swap partition from the first and use it instead of creating a new swap partition.

One caveat is when the BIOS and the Kernel don't agree with the order of the hard disks. This can happen if you have both SATA and IDE disks. So when grub boots it sees the disks one way but after booting, grub-install sees them in another order. The solution is to edit /boot/grub/device.map, mapping grubs (hdX) notation to the kernel's /dev/sdX notation.

Thanks for reply. What do you think happened to Suse to cause the error I listed? I so afraid to lose Suse because of all the stuff I have on it. This all started with Windoze, crashing and needing to be reinstalled. Everything was great until then.http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...l-boot-665358/

The menu.lst you posted has no entry for Mepis so it obviously won't boot from the Opensuse. You indicated you had Grub in the mbr of the drive with Opensuse but when you installed Mepis, you installed Grub to the root partition of that drive and not its mbr. I would assume from what your last post says that you have the Mepis drive set to boot first but, that's only a guess. I agree with jschiwal's statements about the problems you get in your menu.lst and fstab entries when you disconnect a drive during install and then connect them.

You could create a mount point in Opensuse for Mepis, mount it and then navigate to the Mepis /boot/grub/menu.lst file and get the entry to copy to Opensuse menu.lst. You would need to have the Opensuse drive set to boot first

I'm not at all familiar with Xen and have no idea what impact it might have on booting?

I reinstalled windows on the first drive. I can boot into windows if suse is unplugged and I can boot into suse if windows is unplugged. The error message went away. I set my grub menulist to look the way I thought it did before but no luck. Windows is on suses grub menu but won't boot.
# Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Fri Aug 29 23:45:17 PDT 2008
default 0

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title openSUSE 10.3
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_WDC_WD800BB-55J_WD-WCAMDA770235-part2 vga=0x317 resume=/dev/sda1 splash=silent showopts
initrd /boot/initrd

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: floppy###
title Floppy
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader (fd0)+1

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe###
title Failsafe -- openSUSE 10.3
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_WDC_WD800BB-55J_WD-WCAMDA770235-part2 vga=normal showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off noresume nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 edd=off 3
initrd /boot/initrd

title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader (hd0,0)+1

This is weirdest looking menulist I've ever seen.

If Mepis was in the same partition as windows now is and grub was installed in the root of Mepis it would boot from your windows entry. That is one of the neat things about chainloading, you are booting the partition and in turn grub or any boot loader in that partition is booting the distro. Windows is now chainloading.

With two drives, I prefer to put all the OSes on one and use the other for shared data.

This is one place pixellany and I can agree, I believe in one large data partition and one swap partition for all the os's that you will install.

Have we ever disagreed on anything???.......

Another detail: All my shared partitions are ext3. This allows full control of permissions. On the (increasingly rare) occasions that I boot to Windows, I use the ext3fsd driver for Windows. So far, it has worked perfectly.

This will allow you to boot into windows from the SuSE grub menu, swapping the positions of the drives:

Look at the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. My guess is that SuSE is setup in menu.lst as being on (hd0) and in /etc/fstab as /dev/sda. You could try manually fixing the drive references changing hd0 to hd1. In the windows section of grub change hd1 to hd0.

In fstab, the devices for suse may use the partition serial numbers instead. Such as:
These serial numbers will follow the drives. If this is the case, then /etc/fstab won't need to be edited.

I won't disagree with you except I use fat32 for my data. I do not think we disagree on much except sometimes we use different roads to get there.