I've seen a lot of posts about dual-booting this and bootloading that... but nothing seems to answer my current predicament... I've done dual-booting before, SuSE/XP, RedHat/XP yadda yadda... So I tried Mepis, I love it, and I want to put Mepis on a much more powerful system, that currently has XP on it. XP currently resides on a 250GB HD, occupying roughly half of it. I cleaned the back half of the drive, so as to install Mepis there. I installed it as is... and put GRUB in the MBR, just like I had with all the other systems (I like Grub, and it handles Linux and Windoze very well). So I reboot and lo-and-behold, Grub stage 1.5 loads up... and I select Mepis, and then... Grub comes up again, in a much less graphical mode, with the same menu selctions {Mepis and Windows}, so I hit enter again to load Mepis... again, and again... each time I hit it, it goes RIGHT back to the DOS-style Grub screen. It'll load Winblows just fine, oddly enough. So I tried tactic number two: I removed the Mepis install from the master drive, cleaned up a 120GB drive to hold JUST Mepis, and put Grub in the the MBR of that drive, removed all the other drives, making it master, and I get a good clean boot and install... So I reinstalled Grub into /root, copied the first 512 bytes of the drive into a file, loaded up Window$, dropped the file into C:\ and referenced the file in boot.ini. Well, the file has 512 bytes of blanks. There's nothing in the file, and when I switch the drives, making the Windows drive master, the NTLoader asks me for XP or Linux, I select Linux, and I get a really sexy... blinking... cursor...

That's the gist of it in a nutshell... Mepis is on its own drive, as is XP... Since Grub can't seem to load Stage 2 no matter what commands I try (I've been scouring these forums and others for days), I've resorted (shiver) to letting XP handle the loading, since it's come the closest. Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?

(PS~ I know the setup works, to make sure, I briefly installed SuSE 9.3, and managed to get a working dual-boot setup here)

.:Jimmy:.

while installing, check about the location of bootloader... it should be in first sector of the partition.. not in MBR... and you need different partitions for each OS. check the bootloader option for adding more boot loader while installing....

The idea of multi-booting is you can have only one boot loader in MBR to boot the rest. Grub (Lilo or NTLDR) can only do it if each system has a boot loader inside its root partition. Grub can boot any system in any disk by the same generic 3 lines. Say you have Mepis in hdb7 (2nd disk 7th partition is (hd1,6) to Grub as it counts from 0) then the lines needed in /boot/grub/menu.lst (of the Linux having Grub in MBR) are

Title this is my Mepis in hdb7
root (hd1,6)
chainloader +1

Lilo 's equivalent are

other=/dev/hdb7
label=Mepis_hdb7

You can add as many systems as you have space for. I put mine in 5Gb partitions and for 120Gb I can do 24 Linux.

Now how to replicate a Linux boot loader in its root partition?

During installation, simply tell the installer to put in the root partition ( the other choice after MBR!)

Post installation - When you have access to the Linux just log in as root, drop into root terminal and type

grub-install /dev/hdb7

for a Linux using Grub in hdb7 partition or

lilo -b /dev/hdb7

if the same Linux uses Lilo

Don't think you have tried hard enough to search.

This is a relevant thread explaining a little bit more

A laxy way to increase multibooting in Linux http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=401513

*aq_mishu, that was my thought exactly, and that's what I did on try #2, #3, #5... Putting it in the first partition (/root) didn't help, even when I did (/boot) as the first partition. Mepis only gives you Grub, and the only option is where to put it (ie~ MBR, root, floppy) and the hd* you want it in.

*saikee~ Thank you so much for a detailed reply, this is the result I think I'm looking for. The only difficulty I have right now is the only way to get into Mepis is popping in the live CD, but that doesn't access the installation proper.

Now that I think about it... I think /boot might actually be the first partition on this drive...

This is why I come here, people know what they're talking about and don't say, "You're dumb, figure it out yourself". Thanks for the link, maybe I'll take my 120GB and put a few different flavors on it... who knows?

I'll check it all out more when I get back from class, I'll let ya know how it goes... if it goes at all!

.:Jimmy:.

You don't need the installer if you have a Live CD which can boot you into a desktop/kernel command prompt.

The standard method to get to into a distress Linux is by "change root" whereby you "jump" from the Live CD Linux into another Linux installed in a hard disk.

After you boot to a Live CD, click terminal, do a su and supply the root password if demanded, make a tempoary dirctory in /mnt, mount it, chroot and enjoy the access to the distressed Linux. Assuming your Mepis / is in hda2. You type

mkdir /mnt/hda2
mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2
chroot /mnt/hda2

At this point onward you are inside the Mepis installed in hda2 and can do whatever you like with it. With a bit of luck you can even access to the desktop by just typing

startx

Make your mepis drive master, make your windows drive slave. Instalkl grub to the mbr of the mepis drive.
You then need to map the drives so open up (as root) your /boot/grub/menu.lst and make sure your windows entry looks like:

title Windows at hdb1, Windows XP Pro
map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
root (hd1,0)
rootnoverify
chainloader +1

Thanks a lot you guys, you're a big help... the problem I had was I was making /boot the first partition for some unknown and foolish reason. I reinstalled Mepis with /root as the first Linux partition, put the MBR on that drive (with XP) and voila! I'm going to try your method, saikee, for my laptop...

Thanks again everyone! I love this site!

All the above info would go well added in here.
LinuxQuestions.org > Linux Wiki > Dual booting
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Dual_booting

Just learnt heaps of tricks myself.
Thanks NH

To be saikee is to be lazy and this is the lazy way to multi-boot

A lazy way to increase multibooting in Linux http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=401513

How to make a Grub floppy/CD that boots all systems in a PC http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=142409

Hi to all!
Here is a downloadable dr in boot and boot diagnose: http://slackware.at/data/slackware-c...s/sbootmgr.dsk
So you don't need to do any personal job: just download that bootable dikette (no OS dependency!!) which displays all bootable items on your system. So you may play every such item and see what goes wrong; maybe you've got indeed the dd copy of a 512k sexy cursor.
Good luck and please let's know the result!