Hi,

My computer:

Primary disks:

sda master Gutsy + MBR + boot Gutsy + boot Hardy
sdb slave data

Secondary disks:

sdc master Hardy
sdd slave data

When booting I used to get a boot menu offering the choice between Hardy or
Gutsy.
Hardy was installed as latest so it appears as the first item in the boot
menu.

Usually I put my computer into hibernate instead of shutting it down.
Last night I did this and the computer did everything to get into
hibernate.

When I started my computer this morning it booted directly into Gutsy, skipping
the boot menu, and ignoring the fact that it had not been shutdown.
Instead of loading the data pages it began to check the filesystems which
because of the hibernate had not been closed in the usual manner.
Fortunately all my disks are ReiserFs, and no data was lost.
Another reboot showed the same behavior, like Hardy had never been installed.

This has not occurred before and I try to figure out what went wrong.
Obviously something happened to the MBR, and I would like to know if the use of the hibernate function can alter the MBR.

Kind regards.

1. What bootloader are you using? I presume it's 'grub' since lilo is likely to just fail in this situation.
2. Did you check that the disk enumeration hasn't changed? The grub 'root' may be different and grub may be using a different menu.lst. You can change the enumeration by playing with the BIOS and the "boot order" menu (also by physically swapping disks around).

I'm using Lilo for Gutsy, however Hardy uses Grub.
I have never had negative experiences with Lilo. The pro of Lilo is that I can see what's happening during start-up.
If Lilo is the problem...

Well, watch the boot - did you see "grub" or "lilo"?

If you stored both in the MBR of each disk, maybe the disk enumeration changed? You can always remove the unneeded bootloader; it only takes 1 bootloader to load multiple Linux images.

There is only one MBR, on sda. The other disks don't have an MBR; why should they.

However I installed ubuntu hardy with the gnome environment on sdc and this created a brandnew MBR on sda.
I already wanted to try the gnome-flavour and this event was a good occasion, and for the time being the problem is solved.

Remains the question what happened.
Maybe it was the ghost in the machine