Dual Boot Problem

[Jessie Veltman]

On 6/14/05, Jonathan Berry <berryja at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/14/05, Jessie Veltman <sassnak at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 6/14/05, Jim Cornette <fc-cornette at insight.rr.com> wrote:
> > > Jessie Veltman wrote:
> > > >Ok I looked at both device.map and fdisk -l.
> > > >For device.map I came up with:
> > > >(fd0) /dev/fd0
> > > >(hd0) /dev/hda
> > > >(hd1) /dev/hdb
> > > >(hd2) /dev/hdg
> > > >
> > > >and for fdisk -l I came up with:
> > > >Device      Boot   Start  End    Blocks             ID    System
> > > >/dev/hda1     *      1       14946  120053713+    7     HPFS/NTFS
> > > >/dev/hdb1     *      1       13       1049391         83     Linux
> > > >/dev/hdb2            14      14946  119949322+   8e     Linux
> > > >/dev/hdg1     *      1        19457  156288321     c       w95 Fat32 (LBA)
> > > >/dev/hdi1      *      1        9729    78148161      c        w95 Fat32 (LBA)
> > >
> > > It looks like /dev/hda, /dev/hdb and /dev/hdg are alright. Is this
> > > /dev/hdi the SATA device? I take it that you have a /boot partition on
> > > hdb1 and everything else is in an LVM on hdb2.
> > >
> > > I see that all of your drives have an active partition. I have had
> > > problems with not enough active partitions, but not too many. (Black /w
> > > grub with some error w/o the partiton with grub installed set to active.)
> > > Could it be that your BIOS boots the SATA (/dev/hdi) first and Linux
> > > sees it last? Just out of curiousity, can you install grub to /dev/hdi
> > > using grub-install.
> > > If what was discussed about the beauty of using LABEL vs. /dev/hdx
> > > entries in /etc/fstab, linux should get things right once grub is
> > > recognized at boot.
> > >
> > > I'm on a hit or miss mode now. This is just a shot while my eyes are closed.
> > >
> > > Jim
> > >
> > /dev/hdi is actually not a SATA drive. When I was fiddling with this a
> > couple hours ago I switched it to IDE, so I have no SATA drives. Using
> > "grub-install /dev/hda --recheck" I am getting it to try and boot grub
> > now (yay!) but it is giving me "error 17". I looked it up via google
> > but I have no idea why its giving me that error.
> 
> Well, this is progress and that is good :).  My guess is that GRUB is
> still confused about which drive it wants.  The error 17 means that
> GRUB finds the partition, but cannot recognize the filesystem.  This
> probably means it is trying to read the NTFS partition, which is hda1.
>  Either that or it is somehow looking at hdb2 instead of hdb1.  What
> is partition type 8e?  Is it an LVM?
> With complicated setups like you have, it can be hard to figure out
> the actual disk order that the BIOS assigns.  What does your
> device.map file contain now?  What hard drives do you have hooked up?
> What are the contents of /boot/grub/grub.conf ?
> One other thing to try.  Since you mentioned GAG, you can install GRUB
> in your boot partition and use GAG to chain to GRUB (I think, never
> dealt with GAG).  Do the same thing with the rescue CD and chroot and
> try this command:
> 
> grub-install /dev/hdb1
> 
> Then try to use GAG to chain to GRUB.  I think not having GRUB in the
> boot sector is the problem you were having before with GAG.  Or, if
> you have a floppy drive, you can make a grub floppy faily easily (I
> think you can do a cd image too, but I haven't done that).  With that
> we could possibly do some diagnostics to see how GRUB sees your
> drives.
> Oh, and just for the record (since it isn't stated explicitly yet in
> the thread), this is FC4 i386, right?
> 
> Jonathan
> 
The device.map and the fdisk -l stuff is actually from after I changed
the SATA disk to IDE. I am actually dealing with FC4 x86_64. GAG
allows you to fiddle around with settings without actually installing
anything, so I tried to boot to fedora with GAG. It didn't work (said
it was not a bootable partition), but maybe it will work if I do like
you said and install grub to /dev/hdb1. The type 8e partition on
/dev/hdb2 is whatever default that fedora installs when it
automatically partitions a drive.