xp pro and rh7.3 dual boot (grub and partition magic)

George_Hong · 12-09-2002, 01:07 AM

Hi there,
I just installed RH7.3 and win XP pro on the laptop and was able to dual boot using Grub.
But when I tried to recycled a fat32 partition using partition magic, the grub is broken.
Here is the details:

1. format fat32 to NTFS so that it could merge with another NTFS partition, when it's done, the grub simply quit. It gives me command line interface (no pretty graphics). I can manually type the command in grub to boot into windows. But I can't boot to linux. When I try "cat (hd0,5)/boot/grub/grub.conf" it says" files not found". Other partitions gave me similar result.

2. boot from the emergency disk and it complains can't find the image file.

3. Go back to windows and recreate the fat32 partition. Now the graphics interface in grub show up, but I still can't boot into Linux. It complains the files (the kernel) not found.

4. boot from the emergency disk and now I can boot into Linux.

It looks like the disk information has been changed and Grub is not able to catch the update. How do I fix the problem? I really like to merge the two partition into one because the fat32 was used to store the images to install Linux.

Thanks a bunch in advanced.
George Hong

jglen490 · 12-09-2002, 08:21 AM

You are right in that PM modified the partition table on your hard drive thus causing Grub to not work. Partition Magic will not update Grub's configuration file, you will have to do that manually.

A manual update will require knowing the current partitioning set up on the drive and a Linux boot disk to access your Linux space. You will need to boot Linux using the boot disk, mount the Linux partition(s) that have your /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab files. Then modify these with the new partition info.

George_Hong · 12-09-2002, 07:34 PM

Thanks, Glen.
After playing with Grub for a while, I encountered a kernel panic problem. When I try to boot from the Grub in HD, it gives me the message:

pivotroot: pivot_root (/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed 2
<frees 236K of memory>
kernel panic: no init found. try passing init= option to kernel

I did some research and found out the reason is that the system can't mount the / partition so that it can't find init stuff. But the solution they suggested did not work.
"/initrd" directory is there. And I did try to modify the entry in /etc/fstab from "Labels=/" to the physical device /dev/hda7.

So right now I can only boot into Linux using the boot disk I made during the installation.

Any suggestion?
Thx.
George