Cannot Boot Sabayon with RHEL
 

Hey,

I was using Sabayon 4.1 couple days ago and everything was fine, then I also installed Windows Vista on my laptop and it worked fine i could dual boot into both of them. Then I decided to install Red Hat and ever since i could not figure out how to boot into Sabayon again. This is what I get when I try to boot into Sabayon:

'Booting Sabayon Linux x86 (genkernel-x16-2.6.27-sabayon)

root (hd0,1)
Filesystem is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
kernel /kernel/genkernel-x86-2.6.27-sabayon root=/dev/ram0 ramdisk=8192 real_root=UUID=93d82433-e095-4d4e-8227-0ef8eabf2ef dolvm quiet init=/linuxrc splash=quiet,theme=sabayon vga=791 CONSOLE=/dev/tty1 resume=swap:/dev/sda3

Error 2: bad file name or Directory type.

Press any key to continue...

I looked up Error 2: bad file name or Directory type on google and i got information saying error is returned if a file requested is not a regular file, but something like a symbolic link, directory, or FIFO.

this is how my menu.list looks on Red Hat:

title Red Hat Enterprise Linux (2.6.16-53.el5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-53.el5 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.18-53.el5.img

title Sabayon
root (hd0,1)
kernel /kernel/genkernel-x86-2.6.27-sabayon root=/dev/ram0 ramdisk=8192 real_root=UUID=93d82433-e095-4d4e-8227-0ef8eabf2ef dolvm quiet init=/linuxrc splash=quiet,theme=sabayon vga=791 CONSOLE=/dev/tty1
initrd /initramfs-genkernel-x86-2.6.27-sabayon

title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

Supposedly if i get Error 2 bad file name it says its not a regular file.. but i got the file name from sabayons menu.list.. how could it be corrupted or something??
any help plzz?
thx

Try changing your Sabayon entry to the following:

title Sabayon
root (hd0,1)
configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst

That will cause your RHEL bootloader to chain load the Sabayon bootloader. After selecting Sabayon in RHEL, Sabayon's grub boot selection screen should come up. Select the boot selection in this screen that you would normally use to boot Sabayon.

If you get the same error, then the UUID of your Sabayon partition probably changed when you installed RHEL.You can check that by running as root:

# blkid -s UUID

which will print out the uuids of all your partitions. Compare your sabayon partition uuid with the one given in your grub entry.

ya thats what happen wen i installed RHEL it took over Sabayons boot partition. I tried using the supergrub disk to boot into Sabayon and had no luck. Finally I just reinstalled sabayon again i didnt see this post until today but im sure it would of helped.

Thanks for your help anyway

Reading the UUIDs, it looked to me that the two entries for sabayon and rhel were using the same root partition in both of the stanzas. I would expect the two distro's to have different root partitions. One of them may have been wrong.

If you install a second or third distro, I'd recommend installing GRUB to the root partitions MBR for the respective distro, and chainloading, or editing the menu.lst file of the first distro installed. Alwas update grub on the same partition. You could end up in a dueling distro's situation otherwise.