dual booting fc6, f8

[Gene Heskett]

Greetings;

In attempting to come up with a grub.conf which will boot either version of 
the os, I kept running into not being able to boot f8 from anything but a 
fedora kernel.

I have successfully switched the kernel.org 2.6.24-rc6 kernel such that all 
hard drives are now /dev/sd*.

But I figured that would probably need an edit of /boot/grub/device.map, but 
before I did that, I thought I'd run 'grub-install --recheck /dev/sda' sda 
being the new name for the ide0,0 drive, the old /dev/hda.

>From my read of the info page, I assumed it would not write anything, but just 
check what was there for errors.  But it did 
rewrite /dev/hda1/grub/device.map, placing fd0 above the older assignments, 
and appending the new sata drive below as /dev/sdc, and replaced a now 
missing FC2 install on what was /dev/hdb with the /amandatapes drive which 
was formerly /dev/hdd.  There is currently no drive on the middle connector 
of the first ide cable.

Confusing ain't it?

So, thinking that I needed to re-edit my grub.conf to set the f8 drive as 
'root (hd2,0)', I did so.  But now none of the f8 boot stanzas work, error 15, 
file not found.

So I guess I don't understand how grub works as well as I thought.  The info 
pages might tell me, but it seems the only way to read them is backwards as 
once you've gone down a tree to read something, there seems to be only one 
way to back up, using the backspace key, but you never get back to the main 
menu so its easier to 'q'uit it and restart it, but that screws with ones 
train of thought till not even 2 more cups of coffee makes it make sense.

The other ugly thought is that my bios doesn't see the sata drive (sdc) at 
all, and the couple of times I made it boot to f8, I had to move all the boot 
files to /dev/hda1, but specify /dev/VolGroup01/LogVol00 in the kernel 
argument line, but that seems to have quit working too.

What is the usual scenario here?

Should I do an hd assignment swap and then chainload to the sata drive?  But, 
if the bios can't see it, I'd have to assume grub cannot either at that stage 
of the boot.

Or should I just resign myself to having to maintain a boot partition on an 
pata drive just so the system can even find its bootstrap files?  The 
achilles heel there is that its only a 99 meg partition.

That would allow me to use that 200 megs for a dos partition, but what good is 
that if the bios can't find it...  Sigh.

My thanks to all that have read this far.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
He who laughs last hasn't been told the terrible truth.