F15 Dual-boot:: F15 - i686 and F15 x86_64???
 

I used to have a 2 hard drive PC with F14 32bit on one drive and F14 64bit on the second hard drive. Grub would allow me to select the one I wanted to boot.

Now with F15, I seem to be stuck with each drive having it's own boot MBR and grub. I have to use the BIOS Boot option to select the drive for the version of F15 I want.

This seems a bit of a step backwards. What am I missing?

Hi!
One possibility:
During your 2. installation you should have installed the Grub into the boot (if you have one) or root partition and adding an entry in grub.conf of your 1. installation.
alfredo

You only need a boot manager on one drive, not on both. When you installed the second system, you did not need to install grub.

The easy way out is to edit one of the files, and add the other OS on the second disk. This is not too difficult to do if it is grub, not grub2.

Grub2 is more difficult to set up, although it can be done.

Which does Fedora use?

I dual boot Mageia, and Slackware with Grub. Here is what /boot/grub/menu.lst it looks like on my system.

This is Grub, not Grub2. If you are using Grub, then the drive and partition numbering is easy enough. hd0 is the first disk, hd1 is the second. Part number 0 is the first partition. The first partition on both drives is where I boot from.

If you look in the tutorial section on this board, there is info on grub and grub2.

Hope this helps.

what changed?
 

Something has changed between F14 and F15 installation. The first F15 I installed was x86_64 on /dev/sda. It installed grub on the MBR for sda. No issue yet. The problem seems to be that F15 doesn't recognize that when I install F15 i686 on sdb what to do with the F15 on sda. If I select, on the boot/grub screen to put grub on sdb, then it will not boot without a kernel crash. If I select sda, then it wipes out the entry for F15 x86_64. For years, this has been so automatic that I didn't have to think about it or manually edit the grub.conf. Ubuntu has gotten this down to a science even including Win 7 in the mix.

Hi!
If you did "normal" installations you have Grub legacy both in the MBR of /dev/sda and /sdb.
I found a command to find Grub, it must be run as root:
Example (Sabayon Linux KDE, notebook):
Part of Terminal output:
As you see, Grub legacy (v. 0.97) is installed in both MBRs and in the first partition of sdb,
Grub2 is installed in the root partition sdb3 of a Linux using Grub2.
alfredo

Edit:
The so called Grub2 is a beta version - since years!
The command above is not up to date, so it will not find e.g. Grub 1.99!

Hi!
Here is an overview of my experiences with multiboot (2 - 4 Linux distris and Windows).
There are at least 3 possibilities installing a multiboot
(where Linux 1 is a distri with Grub legacy, Linux 2 a distri with Grub2):
I) First installation: A Linux2 (as Ubuntu, Mint, Sabayon,...)
afterwards installation of other distris.
An
as root in
Terminal / Konsole Linux2 will find your other distris and generate "grub.cfg"
con: after kernel updates (other distris) you have to run again that command to update "grub.cfg"
II) First installation: A Linux1 (as openSuse, Mageia, PClinuxOS,...)
afterwards installation of other distris.
You have to edit "menu.lst" of Linux1 by adding 3 lines
or line 3:
configfile /boot/grub/grub.conf
or line 3:
chainloader +1

pro: once done - if it works - it is not necessary to edit.

III) I never had installed Fedora as my first distri, so I don't know how to proceed;
I suppose you must add those 3 lines to your grub.conf of /dev/sda (menu.lst will be changed automatically).
I would first try with "chainloading".
alfredo

Edit:
1. Of course you have to change (hdx,y), e.g. /dev/sdb, partition 7 ->
(hd1,6).
2. The relevant files menu.lst or grub.cfg are in /boot/grub/.

With just 2 installations of Fedora 15 32 bit and 64 bit, I could not find a standard install way to do it and have the grub files merges on the sda drive. I got it done the old fashioned way, manual editing of the gruf.conf file. The best at this is grub2 on Ubuntu. Never had to manually edit anything. Just install Win 7 first if you want that on the system as well.

I was dual booting Sabayon 5.5 and Fedora 14.

When I upgraded to F15 this created a separate line in grub2 that does nothing.
The F15 line says the kernel is not loaded, and I have to select F14 to get to F15,
but some things do not operate correctly. For example clicking log out in F15 does
not turn off the computer, but leaves a blue screen with the F insignia in the middle.
PDF files are now blank. The keyboard preferences can't be changed.

Sabayon 5.5 is not recognizing the upgrade-grub command.
$ su -
Password:
computer ~ # update-grub
-su: update-grub: command not found
#

Hi!
At the moment I'm not on SL, but I know the command is "grub-mkconfig [options]" (not "update-grub"!); see Terminal
alfredo

EDIT:
COMMAND: "grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg" without ""