Re: Boot loader failed to install
Originally Posted by
pchokola
So I tried to chainload into Ubuntu and the menu comes up and Ubuntu loads ! There were a couple of errors immediately after the menu, but I will look into that later. My experience so far is that Red Hat / Fedora have a much more intuitive and polished installation program.
Bootinfoscript is really useful. The Ubuntu installer has some, erm, shortcomings. Don't get me started.
So,
1) Why did this happen so I do not go through this on the next install?
Grub-2 will not work reliably when installed to a partition. This is because it uses absolute sector addressing to find one of its files that's in the /boot/grub directory and this file can change location as the result of normal file system housekeeping. Unlike Windows file systems, the ext system does not appear to make adequate provision for a fixed position boot program. Which sucks.
I know quite a bit about Grub-2. I am a lot less familiar with how Grub-1 works. I know that it does not complain if you install it to a partition and that people do this. But I do not understand how it gets around, if in fact it actually does, the absolute addressing issue. I would like to know but documentation is spartan and it is a pest trying to unravel the source code.
2) How do I fix it without reinstalling everything (I dread setting up all those logical volumes again).
Well, what you have got is not going to be reliable. You are chainloading Grub-2 in sdc3 from Grub-1 in the MBR.
The only "easy" way I know to make Grub-2 reliable is to install it to the MBR. You should be able to use Grub-2 in place of Grub-1 on sdc. You can do everything Grub-1 does with Grub-2 but it is a little more complicated in some ways. At least Grub-2/Ubuntu has an OS-prober tool that will automatically populate the Grub menu by scanning all your drives for OSs.
You could add instructions to boot Ubuntu directly in menu.lst rather than chain-load Grub-2.
You could remove Grub-2 from Ubuntu and install Grub-1.
3) Is it OK to use GRUB2, and is it possible to chainload from Centos6 into Ubuntu 10.04.3 or other similar method (I like the option to have a menu of kernels to pick from), and if so is there a special syntax?.
CONFIGURATION
My intent is to dual boot from Centos 6 into Ubuntu 10.04.3. Is my setup correct? One thing I did not do is set the bootable flag on the /dev/sdc3 /boot partition, but not sure that makes a difference or not.
Not sure. When you say chainload from Centos?
The boot flags are ignored by Grubs. They are only used by the original multi-boot system MBR code, which Grub wipes out.
ASRock P67 Extreme6, Intel i5 2500K, 8GB RAM, nVidia 6600GT, 4x1TB RAID1+0
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