installing grub in Ubuntu Karmic Koala Beta
 

Hi,

I am trying to install grub on my laptop running Ubuntu. I have installed Mandriva (with / mounted on /dev/sda7), Slackware (with / on /dev/sda13) and Ubuntu (with / on /dev/sda10). I had modified grub on /dev/sda7 to make booting into the three distros along with Windoze.

The question is I want to use the grub from Ubuntu for booting. Sowhile in Ubuntu, as root I issued the command grub and at the grub prompt, I issued the following commands -

so it is evident that it is not finding stage1 in /boot/grub in the root partition of Ubuntu. I tried update-grub, which created menu.lst at /boot/grub/. However grub still fails to find stage1 in Ubuntu. Any idea where I am going wrong?

Are all the other Grub files in the /boot/grub partition? Is the kernel file in the boot directory? If you are booting from Mandriva, there is no need for any of the stage files in Ubuntu but you would need the kernel.

Thanks for the prompt reply!

I have the following files in the /boot/grub/ folder -

by kernel files if you mean vmlinuz* files, then they are present in /boot/ folder. Am I missing anything?

You're missing a number of files. Not sure what selection you made for bootloader during Ubuntu installation but the stage1, stage2 and stage1.5 files as well as device.map are not there. If you boot from Mandriva, they're not necessary but, if you want to boot from Ubuntu, they are.

If you have your Ubuntu Live CD or installation CD, you could load it and create a mount point for your Ubuntu installation and copy the grub files to the Ubuntu /boot/grub directory and then run the grub install commands. If you don't know how to do this, post back and you should get some help.

Ok!

A small problem though. I have a live CD of ubuntu 9.04, but I have upgraded to Karmic Koala beta online. Can I use the 9.04 live cd to copy the grub files?

I would doubt it, Koala uses GRUB 2, which is radically different from the GRUB we have been used to for years.

Just grab a 9.10 cd and use the "fix broken sysstem" option to reinstall the bootloader.

Ok! I'll try that.

Hmm, according to the release notes, upgrades do not replace GRUB with GRUB2 so that 9.04 cd may work after all...

See this tutorial from the ubuntu wiki about grub2:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Grub2
It describes how to fully upgrade from grub legacy in 9.04 to grub2 in 9.10. Once you are fully upgraded to grub2 you should be able to just run sudo update-grub to add all your operating systems to grub2's
/boot/grub/grub.cfg file.
If any of you operating systems are not detected after updating grub, create a custom entry in /etc/grub.d as is discussed under "User-defined Entries" in that tutorial. The run "sudo update-grub" again.
I had to add a custom entry to boot my Slackware64 partition. The advice from that tutorial worked perfectly.
I did a clean install of Karmic though, so I did not have to upgrade from grub legacy to grub2.