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I have a single hard drive computer with 12 partitions. One of the distros I put on /dev/hda6 somehow got in there without a mount point!!! And that is what I want to do, add the mount point. This is a Linux only machine, by the way. I could re-install, but I need to remember/know this!!!
Could someone please point me to the info I need.....
Do you want to make /dev/hda6 to get mounted every time you boot? All known file systems are in /etc/fstab. Maybe you want to add a line for your partition?
/dev/sda6 has no mount point and does not show up on the boot menu. So there is no chance of booting that distro. Could I use mount -t /dev/sda6 in order to see partition 6 on the boot menu and boot it?
I have 4 different distros on the HD and would like to be able to boot to all individually and at will.
Short answer to you questions:
Yes and yes....Could I add the info for Partition 6 into the /etc/fstab on partition 5?
A "mount point" is, of course, the directory in your / at which the device is mounted. (E.g., you propose mount command should be something like sudo mount /dev/sda6 /mnt) Note that the "-t" option is omitted since Linux types are usually recognized by mount.
Is it possible that the distribution you installed on a6 is one like Fedora that defaults to using a "Logical Volume," and you're trying to access a LV as though it's a simple partition?
If you're seeing the "no mount point" comment from your boot menu, your boot program is telling you that you haven't told it where to find the "root" file system. Look for a root= (or similar) line in your boot stanza and verify that it's correct.
It is not necessary to mount a partition to be able to boot an OS. How are the other distributions setup to boot? Did you also install the bootloader to sda6 when the OS was installed?
The "large number" is the UUID of the root. You can verify it by booting a working distribution and doing a ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/.
Alternatively, replace the root=UUID=... by root=/dev/sda6. The point in the UUID= is that will, theoretically, find the correct partition even it the partitions are reordered.
I'm puzzled by the BOOT_IMAGE=... part of your boot stanzas, above, since they all start the same initial RAM file system files. Perhaps the distribution you're booting has an interpreter in it's initramfs file that does different things depending on the BOOT_IMAGE value. If so, that seem "cool."
The way this boot menu seems to look is, each distro has the main boot and a recovery and a failsafe mode, if we could call it that....
This little boot menu is courtesy of LinuxMint. So I guess it could be something weird, they are using grub and I'll do some studying and see if I can modify the grub file or hose the whole works...
Not a good thing to do, but it's only a test machine anyway, Linux only...I think it should be easy to include the PCLinuxOS partition, but maybe not so easy....
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. My point was that the BOOT_IMAGE= option is (to the best of my knowledge) a distribution specific thing, and it would be ignored by the initial RAM file system and kernel processing of any distribution that was "unaware" of it. Thus those boot stanzas may, for "unaware" distributions, be identical. I note also that different distributions name their initial RAM file system image files and ROM kernel boot files differently, so it would be unusual for a distribution to use /boot/vmlinz and /boot/initrd.img for the names of the boot kernel and initial RAM file system image files.
For example, on Fedora those stanzas might look like this:
(I picked that as an example since my Fedora 12 is on /dev/sda6 on this laptop.)
Note that, for Fedora, the "recovery mode" is simply to boot to init level 3 (console login mode) which is indicated by the "3" in the kernel options list.
Thanks for the info. That looks a lot like what is in the grub boot menu. I took a look at it today and messed with it a bit. I actually re-installed the partition in question twice and same thing. Didn't show up in the boot menu. I kinda thought it would, but that would be too easy..and not what I started out to do.
Now I think if I re-installed the distro that owns the boot menu, LinuxMint in this case, that it would pick up the partition in question. I may try that tomorrow.
If I really knew what I was doing I could just make an entry in the boot menu and add it. I think.
I have a lot of info on grub and I need to study it a lot more.
There are parts of it I have forgotten and some I still don't understand.....so I'll try to squeeze that in before too long and report back with the results. Should be interesting.
Which of the four distributions you have is installed on sda6?
Which of your four distributions do you boot from?
You have Linux Mint, which release Mint 8? It uses Grub 2. If Ubuntu is 9.10, it also uses Grub 2. Fedora, I think, still uses Grub Legacy and Slackware uses Lilo.
If you installed the last distro on sda6 and installed its Grub to the master boot record, it should have detected the others unless it was Fedora you last installed.
The question of the mount point is irrelevant to booting as indicated above. What you need is a correct entry in whichever Grub configuration file you are using to boot. Answers to the above questions would provide useful information for someone to help.
If you're using a "standard" GRUB (and it surly looks like you are), then you should be able to press the "e" key when GRUB displays its log-on screen. That opens GRUB's built-in, RAM-only, editor. (By RAM-only, I mean that any changes you make to a boot stanza will be lost when you boot from the changed stanza, or when you press <Esc> to abandon an edit.)
Anyhow, a brief edit "how-to" should be displayed at the bottom of the screen.
The "built-in" editor is a handy way to try various different GRUB settings trying to find one that works. (I usually write down what I'm trying so I can edit something that works into the grub.conf file after I finally get it to work.
Oh, one thing: If you're using the "tab-completion" feature to verify path names, remember that the root command has not been executed when you're editing a specific line. E.g., if you wanted to see that list of all files in /boot on /dev/sda6 that start with the string "init", you would have to enter initrd (hd0,5)/boot/init<tab> even if your actual stanza contained a root (hd0,5) line.
Last edited by PTrenholme; 03-23-2010 at 09:52 PM.
Reason: Typo
Thanks. I was doing that a while ago and kinda gave up for today. I can see that I need to know a lot more about PCLinuxOS. There's 8 or 10 lines in each of those boot entries and I think I need to know the kernel version and can't recall the other one now.
I tried to set up a menu.lst file in the /boot/grub folder, but there were some permissions issues there.....and I was getting tired.....so I just cashed in for the night...
I think I might take the easy way out and reinstall LinuxMint just to see what happens. Mainly to see if it picks up PCLinuxOS. Maybe tomorrow.....
sda6 has pclinuxos. I am using Mint 8 and using it's boot loader. And yes you are right. I decided to install another distro today just to see what would happen. I chose PC/OS. It went on ok and sure enough, it picked up all the rest of the distros on the partitions. And with a different looking boot loader. No splash screen, but that's ok.
I have downloaded the grub manual and am going to do this right. I know with the extra distro, and with it's boot manager, I have access to sda6, but that's not the point. I think it can be done by some command line or modifying grub....would be educational for me..
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My point was that the BOOT_IMAGE= option is (to the best of my knowledge) a distribution specific thing, and it would be ignored by the initial RAM file system and kernel processing of any distribution that was "unaware" of it. Thus those boot stanzas may, for "unaware" distributions, be identical. I note also that different distributions name their initial RAM file system image files and ROM kernel boot files differently, so it would be unusual for a distribution to use /boot/vmlinz and /boot/initrd.img for the names of the boot kernel and initial RAM file system image files.
