dual booting pclos and mint

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mikej

dual booting pclos and mint

Post by mikej »

Hi everyone. First off i'd like to say that this appears to be a wonderful forum, full of lots of helpful advice. I'm a newcomer to the Mint world, although not to Linux. I'd really like to give this distro a try. At present I'm using PCLinuxOS as my main distro. Difficulty I'm having is trying to get Mint 4.0 to install grub into it's root partition. I do not wish to disturb my PCLos grub, and want to chainload Mint. In Ubuntu distros in the past, I've always used the alternative cd which gives you the option. I've read here that making the changes under the advanced tab during installation of mint will do just that. However, I've installed about three times now, changing the (hd0) to (hd0, 9) which is my root partition for mint, and always after installation cannot boot into mint from my PCLos grub. I'm sure there's a few methods of getting this done properly, I was hoping that someone could point me in the best direction. Thank you very much for the time all.
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Husse

Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by Husse »

This is not easy and you need some understanding of grub
I would use Mints grub for the dual boot, but that's a matter of taste
(hd9,9) is the answer - or (hd9) don't remember the format in "Advanced"
Now you get grub one in the PBR of that partition
//Edit /I've made a typo here, should be (hd0,9) - not so strange as this "grub stuff" is hard to get right :) //
mikej

Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by mikej »

thanks Husse for the quick reply. I'll give both the options there a try and see how I make out. I'll let you know, thanks again for responding.
Fred

Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by Fred »

mikej,

The problem isn't in the Mint grub install. When you don't install the Mint grub to the mbr you are still using the PCLos grub and it doesn't know Mint is there.

If you want to chainload from the PCLos grub screen you need to manually add the necessary entries to PCLos /boot/grub/menu.lst.

First you tell PCLos where the Mint /boot file is. Open a terminal in PCLos and as root type:

grub (or "sudo grub" if you are using sudo.)

root (hd0,9)

setup (hd0,9)

quit

Now with a text editor open PCLos /boot/grub/menu.lst as root. Add these lines as the last loader lines in that file:

title Mint 4 Daryna
root (hd0,9)
makeactive
chainloader +1

This should allow you to have a Mint entry on your PCLos boot screen and be able to select it for boot.

Having said that, Mint has one of the nicest boot screens I have seen. If you decide you like Mint you might want to switch and use the Mint gfxgrub boot screen. But that's for another day. :-)

Enjoy,

Fred
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Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by MALsPa »

When I installed Mint 4.0 in my multi-boot set-up, I changed (hd0) to /dev/sdb11. That worked; I use another distro's bootloader to boot into Mint. I was also thinking that (sdb,10) would have worked.
Husse

Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by Husse »

@ Fred
You write
Open a terminal in PCLos and as root type:

grub (or "sudo grub" if you are using sudo.)

root (hd0,9)

setup (hd0,9)

quit

Now with a text editor open PCLos /boot/grub/menu.lst as root. Add these lines as the last loader lines in that file:

title Mint 4 Daryna
root (hd0,9)
makeactive
chainloader +1
I don't think that's a good idea :)
Because what you do with this
grub (or "sudo grub" if you are using sudo.)

root (hd0,9)

setup (hd0,9)

quit
makes Mint's grub in sda10 be the one that's used and then it does not matter how you change PCLOS menu.lst
On the other hand it's possible to just install Mint as default, which leads to the PCLOS grub not being used
Then in PCLOS "repair" grub as you describe but of course use the PCLOS partition number and then chainload as described
This however leaves Mint without grub stage 1 and I don't know if it complains about it - but it's easy to repair to let Mint handle it even from within PCLOS - just repeat the above grub action
@MALspa
I changed (hd0) to /dev/sdb11. That worked; I use another distro's bootloader to boot into Mint. I was also thinking that (sdb,10) would have worked.
Not only another distro's bootloader another bootloader altoghether - that does not work with grub
And of course you could only use one partition as the target for the bootloader
mikej

Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by mikej »

thanks all for taking the time to reply. i'm going to give it a shot tomorrow when i have some more time, and will report back and let you know things work. thanks again for the responses, most appreciated
Fred

Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by Fred »

Husse,

Thanks for pointing out my error. As usual you are correct.
Husse wrote:

I don't think that's a good idea :)
Because what you do with this

grub (or "sudo grub" if you are using sudo.)

root (hd0,9)

setup (hd0,9)

quit


makes Mint's grub in sda10 be the one that's used and then it does not matter how you change PCLOS menu.lst
The root line I called out is incorrect. I apologize for misleading you mikej. It should be:

root (hd0,<whatever grub partition the PCLOS /boot is in>)

But I guess it is all academic at this point since I didn't understand that he was not even using his PCLos grub so nothing I said necessarily applies. :-)

Thanks,

Fred
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Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by MALsPa »

I changed (hd0) to /dev/sdb11. That worked; I use another distro's bootloader to boot into Mint. I was also thinking that (sdb,10) would have worked.


Not only another distro's bootloader another bootloader altoghether - that does not work with grub
And of course you could only use one partition as the target for the bootloader
I don't understand; could you elaborate? I have Dapper's grub booting all of my distros, and I used the above to get it to boot Mint. Why do you say "that does not work with grub?" Obviously I'm missing something.
Fred

Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by Fred »

My My!

MALsPa, mikej!? Same person? PCLos, Dapper!? Huh! Sorry, but I am soo confused. Condition normal I suppose. :-)

Fred
Husse

Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by Husse »

@ MALsPa
Grub is using the format (hd0,0) and starts counting from zero so you can't use a /dev/sdx format in grub
Here's a link
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual ... convention
@ Fred
:lol: Yes it's getting confusing here - who's who?
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Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by MALsPa »

@ MALsPa
Grub is using the format (hd0,0) and starts counting from zero so you can't use a /dev/sdx format in grub
Here's a link
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual ... convention
That's incredibly interesting, Husse, because I did in fact use the /dev/sdx format when I was installing Mint's grub to its root partition, and it DID work. I found something somewhere that said I could use either format, so I decided to try the /dev/sdx format, and it worked. I will try to find the documentation that I saw that showed this. So I have Dapper's grub installed on the first partition, and Mint's grub installed on its root partition.

And, no, I am NOT mikej, I don't know exactly why there is any confusion there. He is trying to dual-boot PCLOS and Mint, and I already am multi-booting with Dapper, Mepis 6.5, Mepis 7, PCLOS2007, Mint 4.0, and Etch. Just trying to help out here.
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Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by MALsPa »

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Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by MALsPa »

mikej

Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by mikej »

hi all. i'm mikej :) the one who started the post. malspa is someone who kicked in on the thread. an update here. i've gone through about 6 or seven installs here, trying different methods to get this thing to boot. it goes completely through the install, runs great on the live cd (everything working) until i get to the boot up time and then get grub error messages. so, i thought to heck with it, i'm gonna just let mint have it's way and take the mbr. i can fix pclos later. so, i installed and lo and behold, still no boot. i'm thinking i have a problem with the cd now. so i attempt to burn another with k3b and sure enough cant verify the data this time. bad download maybe? i'm redownloading now to give it another shot. might take a while because i can't get a good speed from the mirrors at the moment. the frustrating part is that it actually ran great live and went all the way through the install. that's why i never considered a bad burn or download. once i give this another shot, i'll post back and see how the above methods work. thanks guys for all the help, i appreciate it. there's a lot of good things said about mint and the forum here over at pclos, and they were right. i'm looking forward to being a part. :)
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Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by MALsPa »

mikej - Good luck, man. Mint's great, I think you'll enjoy it.
Husse

Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by Husse »

@ MALsPa
/dev/sdx will not work in grub - but perhaps Ubiquity transforms it to the right format. This is so interesting (and important) that I might try to install according to this
And the install revealed that Ubiqity translates /dev/sdax to "grubbish"
I works, but if you try it in the solutions above where yo directly edit grub, it will give you an error
Fred

Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by Fred »

MALsPa,

Sorry sir, but I wasn't saying my confusion was your fault. I just said I was confused. If you live long enough, I suspect it will happen to you someday too. :-)

I can honestly say that I have never seen a menu.lst "root" line, (or "root" or "setup" command), in the form /dev/sdx before. And I have seen and set up more than one grub boot system. There is certainly no mention of it in the grub manual.

mikej,

Burn your cd s-l-o-w and check the md5 sum. Setting up grub for a dual boot just shouldn't be that hard. Discounting my typo's of course. :-)

I do think you will like the Mint 4 boot screen better. It is very clean and elegant. In fact I set up all the distros on my computer to boot from a single Mint 4 gfxgrub partition because I liked the way it looks and works. I had separate /boot partitions for each distro, but I put them all back in with their / (roots) to clean up my partition table and save a bit of space. I boot them all off this single Mint 4 gfxgrub partition.

I'll shut up now and wait for a simple, straight forward question my old brain can work with. :-)

Fred
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Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by MALsPa »

Perhaps I have not explained myself well enough.

I didn't use the convention /dev/sdx in /boot/grub/menu.lst. Where I used it is during the installation, as mentioned in the thread that I linked above and again right here:

http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... lti#p39172

Husse, you are saying this doesn't work but it worked for me, as I've said before. My entry in Dapper's menu.lst is a simple chainload entry:

title Linux Mint 4.0
rootnoverify (hd1,10)
chainloader +1

So, perhaps I didn't install Mint according to the instructions you are giving, but the fact is that it is possible to install Mint's grub to its root partition using the convention that Boo described.
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Re: dual booting pclos and mint

Post by MALsPa »

Sorry sir, but I wasn't saying my confusion was your fault. I just said I was confused. If you live long enough, I suspect it will happen to you someday too.
No problem, buddy. I've been walking this dusty earth for a good number of decades myself, so I know the feeling!
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