On my other machine I currently have Ubuntu and DSL installed, but I cannot access Ubuntu from the Grub. I've edited DSL's menu.lst to include this:

At the moment I have 4 partitions on my machine. The first is where Ubuntu resides, 2nd is where DSL resides, 3rd is for DSL backup-persistence, and the 4th is a swap drive.


I have a feeling I'm missing something very easy. Can anyone provide any sort of help? If I have to uninstall/reinstall one or the other I'm willing to do that, but I'd prefer not to need to do that.

Also, I'm taking out my 2nd hardrive in this machine because it's unused and putting a new one in as the main drive and moving the current one to the second drive's place. Should I not bother with all this or can I boot these OS's while they are not on my primary drive?

Shouldn't that be "root=/dev/sda1"?

I just tried that, and I got "Error 15: File not found"

Is that different than what you got before the change?


Boot to the grub menu and press "c" (for the GRUB command line) and try the commands:

GRUB has tab complettion. You might be able to use it to save yourself some typing.

Change this line: To: root (hd0,0)

Both searches returned "hd(0,0)"

I changed to but it didn't help any. I still get error 15 along with this text:

Well, with the corrections I and yancek have pointed out, I don't see a problem. I take it DSL boots from grub just fine? And you are sure this /boot/grub/menu.lst you are editing is in DSL (rather than the Ubuntu partition)? Is it possible a non-printable character has snuck into the file?

This suggestion is really scraping the bottom of the barrel, but you could try typing in the commands manually from the GRUB command line (like you did with the find command) and see if it turns up anything useful. Or succeeds.

You have Ubuntu on the first partition, DSL on the second. If you ran the find commands blackhole suggested from grub, you should have had a response of: (hd0,0) Ubuntu, and (hd0,1) DSL, since both operating systems need these files to boot.

Are you able to boot either system? If not, use a live CD and run the "fdisk -l" command as root or sudo. Post output. Then as root (sudo), type "grub" at the prompt to get the grub prompt (grub>) and do the following commands consecutively:

geometry (hd0)
find /vmlinuz
find /boot/vmlinuz

Post any output.

Yes, DSL boots fine from the Grub. Yes it is in DSL, I've looked at both Grub files and am sure that the one I've been editing is the proper one. A non-printable character could be the problem, I'll try fixing that when I get another chance. I've been editing the grub via these commands in the terminal from within DSL:

And then I make my changes and save the file; is there anything wrong with how I am doing this that could mess something up?

The files are not named the exact same though, so I only received the one result. And yes, DSL boots just fine. I'll try both of your suggestions when I can back to that computer after work.

I've never used nano but I would think that should work fine. I know vi and the less command will show unprintable characters (such as: ^M). I don't know about nano. Also, DSL uses busybox for a lot of commands (I don't know about nano) and these generally have quite a bit less functionality than their full blown counterparts.

I used the vi and less commands, and I didn't see anything extra in the file that looked like it might mess anything up. I've yet to try typing the commands manually from the GRUB command line though.


I ran "fdisk -l" and got this output:

Disk /dev/hda: 8037 mb, 8037679104 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 977 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 790 6345643+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 791 851 489982+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 852 912 489982+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 913 977 522112+ 82 Linux Swap



And when I ran geometry:

drive 0x80: C/H/S = 977/255/63, The number of sectors =15698592, /dev/hda
Partition num: 0, Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
Partition num: 1, Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
Partition num: 2, Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
Partition num: 3, Filesystem type is unknown, partition type 0x82

find /vmlinuz gave me "(hd0,0)"
find /boot/vmlinuz gave me "error 15: file not found"

Maybe I should point out that (the last I checked) DSL does not follow the naming convention for the kernel you are expecting. The two versions of DSL I've worked with (1.0 and 2.4) call the kernel file linux24. I presume the "24" refers to the fact that it is a 2.4 kernel. There was no symlink to linux24 so there would be no reason to expect to find a vmlinuz* on the DSL partition. Please note my information on DSL is over 2 years old.

Just checked my DSL boot directory and blackhole is corrent. There is no vmlinuz file in DSL it it named linux24 which is why you got no output from the find command. Has nothing to do with your being unable to boot Ubuntu.

I think if you change the entry below which I copied from your earlier post you should be able to boot. Change the line: root (hda0,0) to: root (hd0,0). Also change the part in the kernel line from: root=/dev/sda5 to: root=/dev/hda1.

Ok, from the Grub command line I ran the following commands.

Output: "No setup signature found..."

I've not taken the time to figure out what this is about, but take a look at this page and see if it relevant. I'm not sure why it would matter, but at first glance it sounds like maybe an old GRUB version from DSL can't boot a new kernel.