hope this is the right place guys and gals but this is what is going on...ill try to be brief.
I have 3hdd's,(all ide) and I installed all 3 os's independently and gave each os the entire disk, cause i didnt want to partition, and mess with mbr at this moment in time. so 3 hdd's each with 3 os's on them and it works but this. on the first hdd i have xp-pro as slave on primary ide, second hdd as master ubuntu 8.04 primary ide (cause i wanted grub to handle multiple boots not windows), secondary ide i have fedora 10 which i just put on, and an optical drive (dvd-rom) and the bios sees them all as such and having no issues with that. The dual boot of xp-pro and ubuntu 8.04 work great, but i dont know what to put into grub for the 3rd secondary hdd(master) with fedora 10 to show up in grub loader and do its thing. i really hope this is enough info and im not couplter stupid, but linux is new to me so please help. thanks alot guys...im really diggin linux. Jim

Probably the easiest thing to do, in my view ('cause this is what I would do), is to boot Ubuntu (your master Linux installation).

Mount the Fedora partition. Open Fedora's /boot/grub/menu.lst (or grub.conf if that's what Fedora uses) and copy the grub menu entry: should be 3 or 4 lines giving the menu name, kernel, and initrd lines.

Close that file, then open Ubuntu's /boot/grub/menu.lst and paste the Fedora entry where you want it in the line up.

Then reboot to see if that works.

If you have any problems with it, come back here. I'll be around for another couple of hours.

well..i tried but it said to me that i couldnt open it because "There is no application installed for this file type" so...what do i need to do to open them?

ok...i think i need to go into fedora and copy it down i think...i googled .lst files and it said that if it cant be opened with a text editor (which i tried) it has to be opened with the file it was created (i.e. fedora) that sound right?

Sorry, my bad. I should have told you that the file are root user access only. You should su to root, then open/close the respective files for editing.

Be Very Careful. Since you will be using root privileges, you can make changes that normal users cannot make. Any unplanned edits (keyboard inputs into the file) could cause errors that would prevent normal boot, and would require livecd to boot, mount, and debug. Those unplanned inputs can be a bear to find.

ok man...i kinda sorta understand what u said.,...lol your refering to terminal i think...but the commands are what confuse me ya know...lol.

In Ubuntu, you can use the sudo command as well as su. For example, you want to use a gui text editor because you aren't familiar with terminal operations, use sudo to start a gui editor.

Example: sudo kate (or any other gui editor).
Open the file you want to copy text from, and get the text you need.
Open the file you want to paste text into, and paste it in.
Then close both files, and exit the editor.

Sudo alows you to execute one command with root priviledge. Su allows you to swith to root user for extended operations of more than one command.

Does that help?

kinda...so i got into the fedora menu.lst and copied it to a flash drive and just rebooted into ubuntu and wen into the menu.lst into ubuntu and rebooted and it showed up but would not load it off my 3rd hdd (secondary master ide)...im kind of at a loss ya know. i know the hdd works and boots into fedora when i unplugg the other 2 hdd's but its just this little snag i hit for it to boot form the grub from when i put it into ubuntu. dunno..but im not giving up.

If you are going to boot multiple linux distros, it is a good idea to have a separate /boot partition....

The likely reason fedora isn't booting is that grub is looking for fedora's kernel files in [ubuntu_disk_partition]/boot and it is not finding them. You need to copy them from [fedora_disk_partition]/boot to [ubuntu_disk_partition]/boot

There are at least 5 files you need to copy, and you'll need to be root to do this.
The files will look something like this:

If you have two fedora kernels available, you'll have 10 (slightly differently numbered files) to copy over, and so on.

Then, in the section of your [ubuntu_disk_partition]/boot/grub/menu.lst that refers to fedora, make sure that the full filenames are referenced eg vmlinuz-2.6.whatever not just vmlinuz

If, in the beginning, you had created and formatted and referenced a separate partition just for the /boot directory, then all distros would share this, and they'd all dump their needed boot files in the same place, and you wouldn't have this problem.

But I remember, it's all a bit of a puzzle at first.

Persevere though, it's worth it

(As a polite aside, I would really appreciate it if you could make the effort to spell, and punctuate a bit better, otherwise your posts are difficult to read).

I didn't realize you were unplugging drives until your last post. As it stands, each OS was installed on a drive in which it saw itself as the only OS, installed on the first partition of the only hard drive. As a consequence, copying menu stanzas from one menu.lst to another will just propagate errors in the grub configuration.

We need to know the disk and partition setup with all three drives connected at the same time. Make certain that the disk with Ubuntu has the jumper set to primary master, then set the other two disks to primary slave and secondary master. Tell us which OS is primary slave, and which is secondary master so that the menu.lst can be corrected configured to reflect that information.

We need to see the Ubuntu grub menu.lst.

Showing the menu.lst is a simple copy/paste into this thread.

To get the necessary drive/partition information, "fdisk -l' in a terminal will show it. To make things easy for you, run this command 'fdisk -l | tee drives.txt' (without quotes, in a terminal). That will show you the drive/partition information, as well as write that information to a file called drives.txt, in your home directory. Then just copy/paste that info here.

I completely missed that he's been unplugging drives. Thanks for highlighting that point.
Time for "back to the basics"....

ok guys ...thx for the help...i got it working now. basically in a nut shell what i did was copy the menu.lst in fedora, it was set for hd0,0 so i changed it to boot from my 3rd hdd hd2,0 (which is my master on the secondary) and copy it into ubuntu grub menu.lst , and now it all triple boots just fine. still learing the code and stuff it has been a while for me since i even had to mess with dos in windows but its fun if you ask me. thanks again...i know ill be back from time to time asking all your expert linux advice and so on, and reading info too that others have posted so i dont repeat anyone. thanks again. jim


was that too vaugue???lol thanks again.,

lol...nevermind...when i do that last post xp wont load...so i figure it will work i just need to find the proper code to put into grub to get it to see all 3 harddrives independently and point to the right hdd when selecting the os on that hdd...ill get it..thx

Point you browser at http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html, Read section 4.2.6.

ok...finally got it to triple boot correctly now. was just figuring out the commands in men.lst where to have everything point to the right harddrive and all..so thx a million guys. Jim