Installation of 9.04 and 7.04

[huzefa_from_kuwait]

Hi guys, Please help, I got stuck.

I installed 9.04 Desktop on a fresh Hard disk.

I installed in on ext4 partition.

Afterwards I installed 7.04 on another partition.

After installation of 7.04 the grub is going to the 7.04 partition for the menu.lst file (as expected)

I entered the entry for 9.04 in the menu.lst of 7.04 but unfortunately it won't boot (it says file / directory not found) because most probably it cant read the ext4 partition.

Now I can't boot in 9.04 so I booted from System Restore CD and changed the boot partition to be the one of 9.04, but still it won't go there.

When I do fdisk -l it does show me that 9.04 is the boot partition.

Now what do I do?

Please help as I cant get into my 9.04 system !

[coffeecat]

I've no experience of ext4 but I believe your problem is that the version of grub that came with 7.04 wasn't patched to be able to deal with ext4 partitions. The solution is to reinstall the 9.04 grub back to the mbr to use the 9.04 menu.lst, and then edit the 9.04 menu.lst so that you can boot 7.04 from it. You'll be able to reconfigure the 9.04 grub from the 9.04 live CD but first we need some information. You've already done a fdisk -l, but post the output of:


sudo fdisk -l... and then I or someone can give you the grub commands to use from the 9.04 live CD. By the way...


When I do fdisk -l it does show me that 9.04 is the boot partition.

I presume you mean that the 9.04 partition has the boot flag set. Don't worry about that. The boot flag is irrelevant to Linux - Linux doesn't use or need the boot flag. The boot flag is for Windows only.

Er... Excuse the curiosity, by why do you want to run 7.04? :?

[huzefa_from_kuwait]

Thanks for the reply, here you go with the output.

fdisk -l


Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xfc02fc02

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 373 2996091 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2 374 5474 40973782+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda3 5475 6127 5245222+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda5 * 374 2863 20000893+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 2864 5474 20972826 83 Linux


Ubuntu 9.04 menu.lst

title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
uuid 6a79d3d4-5adf-4e42-bf57-583500db377d
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=6a79d3d4-5adf-4e42-bf57-583500db377d ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
quiet

title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic (recovery mode)
uuid 6a79d3d4-5adf-4e42-bf57-583500db377d
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=6a79d3d4-5adf-4e42-bf57-583500db377d ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic

Ubuntu 7.04 menu.lst

title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.20-15-generic
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-15-generic root=UUID=ed55d1d9-85be-4bd9-86bb-d8e019b9dbd5 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.20-15-generic
quiet
savedefault

title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.20-15-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-15-generic root=UUID=ed55d1d9-85be-4bd9-86bb-d8e019b9dbd5 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.20-15-generic


root@ubuntu:/u7/boot# sudo vol_id -u /dev/sda6
bad4c6ec-5a31-4a66-861b-b7548408f8be
root@ubuntu:/u7/boot# sudo vol_id -u /dev/sda5
6a79d3d4-5adf-4e42-bf57-583500db377d
root@ubuntu:/u7/boot# sudo vol_id -u /dev/sda3
ed55d1d9-85be-4bd9-86bb-d8e019b9dbd5

[coffeecat]

OK. Your 9.04 root partition is on sda5, which is (hd0,4) in grub-speak.

Boot up from the 9.04 live CD and open a terminal, and:


sudo grubThe prompt will change to the grub one. Now...


root (hd0,4)
setup (hd0)
quitObviously with a <return> between each line. Hopefully, you'll get a 'success' message after the setup command. Now reboot and you should be seeing the 9.04 grub menu. Boot into 9.04, and all you have to do is to add the 7.04 stanzas to the 9.04 menu.lst. I'll leave that to you as you clearly know your way around menu.lst.

Good luck!

Edit: the above is the way I like to reinstall grub - I'm doing it all the time with my multibooting machines. :) But there is a slightly quicker way, which I forgot about until this moment. Apologies for that. You can use SuperGrubDisk (http://www.supergrubdisk.org/). It will find all the Linux installations in a multiboot, let you boot into any of them and reinstall grub for whichever one you want. However, the SGD menu is not at all intuitive and it's difficult to make out what's going on - at least until after it's happened. Nevertheless, I do recommend you download that for your emergency toolkit. It's also a quick and easy way of reinstalling the Windows mbr - if you ever need to. Much quicker than using the Windows install disc.

[huzefa_from_kuwait]

Yep, that did it.
Thank you , thank you , thank you very much :-)

Now i will install solaris 10 on another partition, and once it is screwed again, i will repeat the same procedure :)


btw I use 7.04 because I cant get packet injection working on any other kernel except 2.6.20.* :)


Thanks again.