Hi All,

Trouble shooting a grub install after moving an resizing partitions and install winxp along side a stable Ubuntu 8.04 system.

I found that all directions I followed do their thing, however, grub keeps creating menu.lst on the ubuntu ramdisk that is created from the liveCD. I keep thinking it has found the real /boot/grub directory but that is never the one updated.

How can I correct for this. Since whenever I reboot, the ramdisk directory is gone.

Thank you

You could either use chroot to start running from the hard drive instead of the live distro; or when the grub menu first comes up, enter the grub shell and select the kernel and initrd file from the hard drive. Enter the correct root line, for where the partition is now. If the /etc/fstab file uses the drive ID's or UUIDs instead of the device nodes in the first column for the partitions, then you will be able to boot up without having to first edit the fstab file.

After booting, you will need to edit the value of the "root <dev>" line of grub's menu.lst file to reflect the partitions' new locations.
The /etc/fstab file needs to be correct to be able to boot successfully without dropping out into the maintenance shell. The menu.lst file needs to be correct for re-installing the grub boot loader.

You can install the grub bootstrap loader to the MBR of your hard drive or to the MBR of the partition you moved. If doing the later, you can follow the instructions (look in google for "nt grub dual boot") to modify the BOOT.INI file of windows to chainload the grub loader, but cutting out the partition's MBR to a file on the Windows C:\ drive and adding an entry in C:\BOOT.INI. If you had vista, this would work as well. Even though Vista doesn't have a BOOT.INI file by default, if you create one, it will be used.

I suspect you should be looking at grub-install, not update-grub. In fact, for the sake of your sanity, forget update-grub exists.