I have added mandrake linux, just to try it, and the time I have spent on it has been editing the grub.conf in my redhat to get it to boot. (win98SE also on this hard drive)(mandrake is only one that wont boot with grub.)

I finally read on another site , after searching and searching, trying many iterations and carefully checking spelling tortuously, that the correct way is to load the second linux distro on one HD by chainloading. Don't specify the /boot/vmlinuz and so forth treat it like windows. Just list root location.

Is that what has worked for others? It seems like I would have seen that around here. Never saw anything like that mentioned anywhere else.

I have currently:
root (hd0,6)
kernel /vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda7 hdc=ide-scsi
initrd /initrd.img
(that gets me an error 15 file not found.)

using
kernel /boot/vmlinuz ....
initrd /boot/initrd.img
gets me partway, it loads some, then gets to INIT and says "kernel panic"

hum - if it gets that far then i am thinking this is not due to GRUB - you may wnat to make the initrd.img image - this snippet from a kernel PET here has info that may help:

So right now you have Win98, RedHat, and Mandrake installed, but you can only get Win98 and Redhat to boot from Grub.

I don't believe Linux can be "chain loaded", by the definition of the Grub "chainloader" command. I would advise copying the RedHat stanza in your menu.lst file, pasting it back into the menu.lst file as a Mandrake stanza, and then modifying the entries for the exact hard drive locations of your Mandrake files (i.e., hdb, hdb1, etc).

Please post the entire contents of your current /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

Try this:

Boot to RH and mount your Mandy partition somewhere sensible, like /mnt/mandy. Copy the Mandy kernel image over from the Mandy boot dir to the RH boot dir, for example cp /mnt/mandy/boot/vmlinuz /boot/mandykernel. Then in your Grub file, have something like:

root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/mandykernel ro root=/dev/hda7 hdc=ide-scsi
initrd /initrd.img

You may also have to mount the Mandy partition and copy the initrd.img over as something sensible, like mandyinitrd.img

Good luck.

You can chainload linux. Just install mandrake's boot loader (grub or lilo) into its root ' / ' partition. Then enter these lines into the grub config file:

title Mandrake
rootnoverify (hd0,6)
chainloader +1

It will boot up into either grub or lilo. Then you can boot into mandrake.

Thymox, your idea might work if the complete path is given. It has to do with the root command. It not only sets where grub will look for its files, it can also be used as part of the path to a file. In this case, the kernel and initrd paths will look like this when expanded:

kernel (hd0,6)/boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda7 hdc=ide-scsi
initrd (hd0,6)/boot/initrd.img

So, grub will look for these files on partition hd0,6 ( hda7 ). Not red hat's partition.

For yours to work, the partition where the /boot directory is located will have to be entered in the kernel and initrd lines. Let's say red hat's /boot directory is on hda2 ( hd0,1 ). So, it will look like this:

kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda7 hdc=ide-scsi
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd.img

The (hd0,1) has to be added to the lines since root will still be pointing to (hd0,6).

lacrimae, could you list all the partitions for both red hat and mandrake and what they are for ( root, boot, home, ...)?