After Removing PcLinux Gnome Daryna will not boot

[Fornhamfred]

I have a muti distro installation in which I had two Gnome based distros, Mint & PcLinux Gnome. Having decided that Mint was the better version I formated the partitions on which PcLinux was installed and installed the Mini-Me version of PcLinux. I have also got PcLinux 2007 and Mepis installed. All of the distros will now boot except for Mint. Normally when I boot Mint the screen goes blank until the login screen, there is not a verbose listing or any graphics. It is therefore impossible to see where the install hangs. Is there any log file which will give the information?

[Husse]

Have you by any chance (accidentally) changed the menu.lst entry for Mint?

[Fornhamfred]

Thanks Husse
Mint is booted from the PcLinuxOS 2007 menu.lst which was redone after the installation of mini-me. I have checked the entry against the Mint menu.lst and it is correct.Mint was booting perfectly,before the removal of PcLinux Gnome, from the PcLinux 2007 menu.lst. Is it possible to re-instate the Mint MBR without re-installing to check whether it will boot. Also as my first question is there a log file to check where the boot is stalling. I have checked under /var/log/boot but trying to open the file from PcLinux gives an error message. Have been able to open it from root and there is no entry.

[Husse]

I don't really know about the log - have to investigate to find out more
But you can reinstate grub so it points to the Mint partition
See the wiki
http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... _your_grub
Think carefully about which partition is which

[Fornhamfred]

Thanks Husse

I have run the re-install grub but this has made no difference, the system still boots from the PcLinux menu.lst. How-ever I did manage to get Mint to the log-in page where once I entered my name & password it gave the following error.

User #HOME/dmrc file is being ignored. This prevents the default session and language from being saved. File should be owned by the user and have 644 permissions. Users $Home directory must be owned by user and not writeable by other users.Pressing Ok resulted in the session being ended.

This is the same problem that I have experienced when installing other distros on the same disk, they appear to want to use the same home directory. Can you have more that one home directory on the same disk but in different partitions? I have checked the partition and there is no home file present.

Looks like a re-install to me!!!

[Husse]

If you changed grub and still used the same menu.lst you made a mistake.
In this case you should have kept grub to whatever boot record you had - probably MBR which is hd0
Then you should have given the partition for Mint - count starting from zero.
So if Mint was /dev/sda2 the position for grub when you change it should be (hd0,1)
Change for your needs. There is no danger in changing grub's location
You can share home between different distros, but you must have exactly the same user name and the same user id which is 1000 for the power user in all Debian based (and so Ubuntu and Mint and...)
If this is not the case you get the kind of "home error" you describe.
And yes, you can have a home in every partition, but only use one home for each active distro

[Fornhamfred]

Husse

Perhaps I ran the the grub-reinstall incorrectly. The search showed the Mint root to be hd1,4 (actual partition is sdb5) and that is what I entered. When I re-booted the machine I expected it to boot to the Mint splash screen and not the PcLinux one.

With regard to the home partitions what I have on my system is one disc with partitions for Windows, PcLinux 2007 root, PcLinux 2007 Home and a Fat32 Partition. On the second drive I have partitions for Mepis root, Mepis Home, Mint Root, Mint Home, PcLinux Mini-me root and PcLinux Mini-me Home. There are also several partitions not used. The Mint home partition seems to get corrupted every time I install a new distro even when the installer asks which partitions should be used.

Does this make any sense to you?

[Zwopper]

Try [SuperGRUB] - it worked magic for me!

[Husse]

Using UUID?
http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... _a_problem

[Fred]

Would bet my "little left pinky finger" the UUID has changed and doesn't match up in the working "/etc/menu.lst" file.

Enjoy,

Fred

[Husse]

doesn't match up in the working "/etc/menu.lst" file.

I bet it does not - this is not Fedora
menu.lst is in /boot/grub but if I remember correctly Fedora has a link there to /etc, but I think the file in /etc is called something else
Anyway, I'm not the least bashing you Fred, I've done a few "typos" like that myself

[Fred]

Husse,

You are absolutely positively correct. I stand corrected.

I saw it as soon as you pointed it out. Would you believe that is my first mistake ever?! lol Didn't think so.

Humbled,

Fred

[Fornhamfred]

Thanks Husse and everyone else but could not resolve the problem. Have now reinstalled and have a fully working system again. It may be of interest that after the reinstall the UUID of the root and home partitions are the same as when the system was operating before.

[Husse]

The same UUID is expected if you did not change the partitions and installed the same Operating system
However if that was not the case...
This is why it's so bad, maybe you decide to split your root partition into root and home - then root does not keep its UUID

[Fornhamfred]

I am back to square one.
Perhaps I can run through my setup again.
I have a Dell Optiplex 170L with 1Gb ram and two harddrives 40gb and 160gb.
On the small drive is a copy of XP pro , swap partition and PcLinuxOs 2007 root partition and home partition.
On the other drive I have separate partitions for Mepis Root and Home, Mint Daryna Root and home, PcLinux Mini-me Root and home and several spare partitions. Every time that I remove any of the other distros I get the problem listed in previous posts. For instance I had to re-install PcLinuxOS 2007 and this caused the problem with Mint and I have had to re-install Mint again. This is obviously not right as I am always able to boot into the other distros, only Mint seems to be affected. Can someone please suggest why my set-up is causing the problem. Also is it possible to do a remaster of my current Mint installation just in case this happens again?

[Husse]

I'm not 100% sure but it seems Mint may be the only one using UUID.
Daryna does not use it in menu.lst but in fstab.
So if it happens again edit fstab (from some working Linux) and exchange UUID for dev
First you have something like

# /dev/sda2
UUID=8cb04e6f-dee9-4de6-980e-d648eba537af /media/sda2 ext3 defaults 0 2

change to

# UUID=8cb04e6f-dee9-4de6-980e-d648eba537af
/dev/sda2 /media/sda2 ext3 defaults 0 2

I prefer to keep the UUID for reference
I did not read the topic again before answering (just your last post) as I'm pretty sure this is it...

[Fornhamfred]

Thanks Husse

If this happens again when I amend another distro I will try your suggestion and report back.

It suprises me that no one else has had this problem when running multi distros on one machine.

Is there any way to remaster my setup just in case it does happen again?

[Husse]

no one else ?
UUID is one of the most common problems we have "in this sector" - I don't know how many times I've answered UUID questions