Dualbooting problem

J_K9 · 11-10-2004, 01:42 AM

I just installed Mandrake 10.1 on my box which already has Fedora Core 1 on it. The only problem is that every time I boot up my computer, Fedora comes up! It only allows me to boot from Fedora, and doesn't even give me a chance to boot from Mandrake. Can someone please tell me what to do, because the only other things I've seen about dualbooting are with Windows and Linux, never Linux and Linux. Anyway, could you please tell me what to do so that on start-up I can have the choice to boot from Mandrake 10.1 or Fedora Core 1? I'm using Fedora's boot loader (GRUB). I know how to change to LILO if you want me to.

I know that Fedora Core is on hda1 and Mandrake: "/" is on hda6, "/home" is on hda7.

Someone on Antionline told me to do this: so here's what I typed into /boot/grub/grub.conf:

Code:

title='Mandrake'
root(hd0,5)
kernel /2.6.8.1 root=/dev/hda6

There is one problem though - I have looked in /dev and "hda6" doesn't appear to be there.

When I tried rebooting my box to see if it worked, this error message shows up:

Code:

     Booting 'Mandrake'
root (hd0,5)
   Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
kernel /2.6.8.1 root=/dev/hda6

Error 15: File not found

Press any key to continue...

In bash, "fdisk /dev/hda", showed up "hda6 ........ Linux" & "hda7........Linux".

hda6, according to the Mandrake custom partitioner, was the "/" partition.

I have been told to type in the kernel's exact filename, not just the version number (in grub.conf), but if I can't boot into Mandrake or mount it's hard drive how can I find that out? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance,

J_K9

jschiwal · 11-10-2004, 02:49 AM

The grub shell has an autocompletion feature, so you can type in the first part:
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz

Pressing the tab key will show you all of the files which match the pattern. Mandrake may have a link /boot/vmlinuz pointing to the actual kernel file.

Then do the same thing for
initrd (hda0,5)/boot/initrd

and enter the line for root:
root (hda0,5)/

Then type in 'boot', press the enter key, and cross your fingers.

If it loads up, you might want to create a mount point for the RH root partition, so you can edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file to reflect the corrections.
(Assuming that you will use the original boot loader)

Only update the boot loader on one of the systems so you don't have a case of dueling boot loaders.

J_K9 · 11-10-2004, 05:43 AM

The GRUB shell??? I just open the grub.conf file in gedit, but when I press tab it just goes to the next tab instead of coming up with the kernel name/number etc...

Could you please tell me how to open/use the GRUB shell? Is it accessed through the terminal? Thanks a lot for your help so far,

J_K9