Tried to have a triple boot up system. But..............
 

Hi there everybody.
I have got this little problem.

I have got two hard disks of 40 gb each with WIN XP installed on one of them (the master drive).
On the slave side , I installed WIN 2003 and then Fedora.
Everything was working fine with the grub showing DOS as well as linux.

Then one fine day I decided to install Mandrake 9.2 and that's where my troubles began.
My previous grub was overwritten by a new grub.
So now i can get into windows and mandrake but not into fedora.

I used the fedora cd to get into the rescue mode and tried using the grub-install /dev/hda
command but it says that the command was not found.
Also it says that no previous linux installations were found on your computer.
Has it something to do with linux being installed on a second hard disk?
How do I access my fedora without any damage to my other operating systems and without reinstalling fedora?
Is it possible to have a grub showing two linux distros i.e. Fedora and Mandrake alongwith DOS as well ( a triple boot up system) ?

Please help me solve this problem.

I hope you have not overwritten your fedora installation with Mandrake!
In order to help you, we need to know something about how your disk partitions are set up.
I am at work right now, so you may need to check my command syntax!

Boot into mandrake.

Be careful here, as you need to be root:

Run fdisk /dev/hda
I think you then press "m" for a menu. Look at the menu, and choose the option to list the partition table (I think it is "p")
Tell us what it says. Then quit without saving any changes.

Then do the same for /dev/hdb

Then print out a copy of mandrake's /etc/fstab and post that too.

With the above data we should be able to work out what is going on, what is where, and get fedora back.

Yes, it is possible to have triple boot (I have MDK9.1, 10.1 and er....win98), it takes a little setting up, but is not too difficult.

When installing more than one Linux distro, you only need one grub installed to the MBR (think master bootloader); all others can be installed to their own partition.
Then, while still in the newly installed distro, mount the partition for the master distro (the first one you installed and wrote grub to the MBR). Copy the grub.conf menu entry for the new Linux distro from /boot/grub/grub.conf (only the part that lists the new distro) to /boot/grub/grub.conf of the master grub.conf. That adds the new distro to the boot menu you will see on startup.
Since Mandrake's grub is now written to the MBR, just boot 'Drake, and mount the fedora partition. Copy the menu listing form fedora's /boot/grub/grub.conf and paste it into 'Drake's copy of /boot/grub/grub.conf (or menu.lst if that's what 'Drake uses).

Either that, or you have to make sure that you copy the kernel image and initrd to the /boot partition or directory + add them manually to the grub.conf (well, presumably as when I tried it I had XP and 3 distros running and was using Lilo).

From memory it's a fair while ago, as you also have to have seperate / partitions etc. If I recall correctly, I had it so I had

hda1-winXP
hda2-/boot
hda3-/swap
hda4-extended into>hda5-mandrake, hda6-knoppix (hard disc install), hda7-SuSE and hda8-/home.

It took a lot of messing about, as I wanted to be able to see each of the different distros from each other, which meant mount points, fstab entries, etc etc.

But it worked, for about a fortnight, then I got bored with it. It was too much of a pain to maintain.

regards

John

Hi all
Thanks for all your answers.

I went thru my partitions again. I havent overwritten mandrake on fedora.
Both of them have been installed on different partitions.

Here is what my /etc/fstab file looks like

/dev/hdb9 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hdb8 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/scd0,fs=udf:iso9660,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,codepage=850,umask=0,sync,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat codepage=850,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
/dev/hdb5 /mnt/win_c2 vfat codepage=850,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d vfat codepage=850,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
/dev/hdb6 /mnt/win_d2 vfat codepage=850,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
/dev/hda6 /mnt/win_e vfat codepage=850,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
/dev/hda7 /mnt/win_f vfat codepage=850,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
/dev/hda8 /mnt/win_g vfat codepage=850,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
/dev/hda2 /mnt/win_h vfat codepage=850,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
/dev/hda3 /mnt/win_i vfat codepage=850,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb4 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb7 swap swap defaults 0 0

And as far as the grub.conf entry is concerned should i copy the entire grub.conf file from the mounted fedora to mandrake or only a part of it.
If only a part plz specify which part.

Thanks Again.

We need to know which partition your mandrake is on, so we can mount it: What is the output from fdisk -l (that's "minus ell" not "minus one"!)?

Hi again all of u
As directed by bigrigdriver I mounted the fedora partition on to mandrake and copied the /boot/grub/grub.conf entry into /boot/grub/menu.lst on mandrake.
Now when I boot the system the grub shows an entry for both linux distros and windows as well.
But when i boot into fedora it says error 15 : file not found.
Maybe there is some boot file in fedora which i am supposed to copy to the mandrake partition, but i dont know which.

And tredegar this is what my fdisk -l says

Disk /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 * 1 319 2562336 b Win95 FAT32
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2 320 765 3582495 b Win95 FAT32
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3 766 1403 5124735 c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part4 1404 4865 27808515 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part5 1404 2550 9213246 b Win95 FAT32
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part6 2551 4080 12289693+ b Win95 FAT32
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part7 4081 4782 5638783+ b Win95 FAT32
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part8 4783 4865 666666 b Win95 FAT32

Disk /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/disc: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/part1 2 2832 22740007+ 5 Extended
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/part2 * 766 778 104422+ 83 Linux
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/part3 779 1734 7679070 83 Linux
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/part4 1735 1799 522112+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/part5 2 383 3068383+ b Win95 FAT32
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/part6 384 765 3068383+ b Win95 FAT32
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/part7 1800 1864 522081 82 Linux swap
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/part8 1865 1876 96358+ 83 Linux
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/part9 1877 2832 7679038+ 83 Linux

Note that I first installed fedora and then mandrake.

Bye for now.