multi-boot 3 linux os and installation issues

[ictbicol]

POSSIBLE WORKING PC INSTALLATIONS:

This are my current PC Workstation Installations:

1. PRIMARY PARTITION- WINDOWS XP
LOGICAL PARTITIONS- 1. FEDORA 6 OR CENTOS 5
2. UBUNTU 8.04.1
3. LINUX MINT 5
2. PRIMARY PARTITION- FEDORA 6 OR CENTOS 5
LOGICAL PARTITIONS- 2. UBUNTU 8.04.1
3. LINUX MINT 5

PROBLEM: When I upgrade from LINUX MINT 5 TO LINUX MINT 6
this sequential installation is no longer possible.
Please help. I needed all those installations for
educational purposes, i.e. teaching RPM and DEBIAN type installations in all of my PC Workstations.

from ICTBICOL

[DataMan]

I guess I'm a bit puzzled by your question ( this may be caused by the fact that it's 04:53 here and I'm still on my first cup of coffee ).

Are you saying that the Mint 6 did not install where you wanted it to go?

Are you saying that your GRUB menu is not sequenced properly?

DataMan

[kansasnoob]

I'm also running a multi-boot as you can see from my output of:

Code: Select all

sudo fdisk -l

BTW, that's a lower case L.

lance@lance-desktop ~ $ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for lance:

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x63056305

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 2677 21502971 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 2678 9729 56645190 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 2678 5035 18940603+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 5036 5169 1076323+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7 5170 5934 6144831 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 5935 7434 12048718+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda9 7435 8199 6144831 83 Linux
/dev/sda10 8200 9729 12289693+ 83 Linux

In my case:
sda1 = Win XP
sda2 = an extended partition in which all Linux partitions exist
sda5 = Ubuntu 8.04.1
sda6 = SWAP
sda7 = Ubuntu 8.10 /
sda8 = Ubuntu 8.10 /home
sda9 = Mint 6 /
sda10 = Mint 6 /home

For some reason Mint's grub-gfxboot did not properly identify the other partitions so I could only boot Mint and XP. The easiest way for me to fix mine was to restore Grub to Ubuntu 8.10, which had been booting XP, 8.04.1 and 8.10 fine, and I then edited the menu list to include the Mint entries (just as shown in Mint's menu list).

Do you know which OS's Grub you were booting from last? If this was an upgrade from Mint 5 to Mint 6 (rather than a fresh install) it would I'd think be easiest to edit the new Mint menu list.

The first thing to know is what your:

Code: Select all

sudo fdisk -l

looks like. Assuming of course that you can boot Mint. Come to think of it I need to know what OS's you can boot.

So let's start there:

(1) Post the output of "sudo fdisk -l" if you can boot Mint and as best you can an explanation of what each partition is.

(2) If you can boot Mint also post the output of:

Code: Select all

cat /boot/grub/menu.lst

Again that's a lower case L. And yes, it's a long list but I need to see it all.

(3) I need to know which systems you can currently boot and any errors reported for any listed partitions in Grub that you can't boot. And it would be really helpful to know which system was controlling boot before installing or upgrading Mint.

[kansasnoob]

I'm also running a multi-boot as you can see from my output of:

Code: Select all

sudo fdisk -l

BTW, that's a lower case L.

lance@lance-desktop ~ $ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for lance:

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x63056305

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 2677 21502971 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 2678 9729 56645190 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 2678 5035 18940603+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 5036 5169 1076323+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7 5170 5934 6144831 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 5935 7434 12048718+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda9 7435 8199 6144831 83 Linux
/dev/sda10 8200 9729 12289693+ 83 Linux

In my case:
sda1 = Win XP
sda2 = an extended partition in which all Linux partitions exist
sda5 = Ubuntu 8.04.1
sda6 = SWAP
sda7 = Ubuntu 8.10 /
sda8 = Ubuntu 8.10 /home
sda9 = Mint 6 /
sda10 = Mint 6 /home

For some reason Mint's grub-gfxboot did not properly identify the other partitions so I could only boot Mint and XP. The easiest way for me to fix mine was to restore Grub to Ubuntu 8.10, which had been booting XP, 8.04.1 and 8.10 fine, and I then edited the menu list to include the Mint entries (just as shown in Mint's menu list).

Do you know which OS's Grub you were booting from last? If this was an upgrade from Mint 5 to Mint 6 (rather than a fresh install) it would I'd think be easiest to edit the new Mint menu list.

The first thing to know is what your:

Code: Select all

sudo fdisk -l

looks like. Assuming of course that you can boot Mint. Come to think of it I need to know what OS's you can boot.

So let's start there:

(1) Post the output of "sudo fdisk -l" if you can boot Mint and as best you can an explanation of what each partition is.

(2) If you can boot Mint also post the output of:

Code: Select all

cat /boot/grub/menu.lst

Again that's a lower case L. And yes, it's a long list but I need to see it all.

(3) I need to know which systems you can currently boot and any errors reported for any listed partitions in Grub that you can't boot. And it would be really helpful to know which system was controlling boot before installing or upgrading Mint.

[ICTBICOL]

The Main Grub Menu is CENTOS 5 or FEDORA 6.
From there I could choose WINXP, UBUNTU 8.04 and LINUX MINT 5.

Upgrading LINUX MINT 5 to Linux Mint 6 makes Linux Mint 6 unbootable while the other OS are OK.

FROM
ICTBICOL

[ICTBICOL]

My multi-boot partitions are like these:

sda1 = Main Partition - WINXP/NTFS

Extended Partitions:

sda2 = either CENTOS5 or FEDORA 6
sda3 = CENTOS5/FEDORA SWAP
- Added Ubuntu and Linux Mint Menu.lst here

sda5 = Ubuntu 8.04 - installed boot in sda5
sda6 = Ubuntu SWAP

sda7 = Linux Mint 5 - installed boot in sda7
sda8 = Linux Mint 5 SWAP

All these works fine. The problem is Linux Mint can no longer boot if upgraded from Linux Mint 5 to Linux Mint 6.

From
ICTBICOL

[lemonlime]

I'm having the same problem. I installed Linux Mint 6.0 to replace 5.0. I have a copy of the old menu list, and it looks identical to the new menu list, but I can only boot up my other 5 Linux operating systems. I've changed the information in Grub with no success. 6.0 is fun to run on the Live CD, but, If I can't get it going on the hard drive, I'll reinstall 5.0 and wait for a "fix" listing in the forum.
Thanks,
John

[Fred]

ICTBICOL,

A few thoughts that might help you out.

Are you chain loading Mint and Ubuntu from your active menu.lst? If not you probably should be.

Mint uses gfxgrub, not sure about Fedora, but I don't think Ubuntu does. At least they didn't before this last release. I suggest you use the same version of gfxgrub on all the distros. You can do this from the command line in the Mint 6 install with the root and setup commands. Use Supergrub as a boot disk if needed. Don't fix anything with it, just use it to boot the desired distro.

Ubuntu and Mint both use UUIDs. This makes for terrible problems when running multiple distros. Every time you touch a partition it changes the UUID so the fstab files stay screwed up. If you are going to have several distros installed, as I do from time to time, I recommend changing over to LABEL as a unique identifier for your partitions. It will save you many headaches in the long run. There are posts in the forum by me and probably others about the use of labels.

I see you have 2 swap partitions on the same drive. The only way you would get any benefit from having two swap partitions would be if they were on two physical drives.

You may not want to do this now but I find it much more convenient to have a common boot partition, /gBoot, and boot all my installs from there. Each install is independent and has it's own dedicated /boot folder but the common /gBoot chain loads all the distros independently. This way I can change any distro and it doesn't have any effect on the others and I don't have to redo anything for the other distros. There is a post somewhere in the forum showing how I laid mine out at the time. Search for Fred /gboot.

Enough confusion for one post.

Fred

[lemonlime]

Thanks Fred.
I installed Linux Mint to install grub on it's root partition rather than the MBR. I went to my main menu.lst on my first installed Linux OS. I added the following to get it to boot Linux Mint.

title Linux Mint 6.0 @ sda7
root (hd0,6)
chainloader +1

I selected "Linux Mint 6.0 @ sda7" from the boot screen, and it immediately went to the Linux Mint partition and I booted up Felicia.
Thanks for the inforrmation.
John

[Pierre]

I installed Linux Mint to install grub on it's root partition rather than the MBR

is that done in the advanced box, when it installs grub?.

P.

[Fred]

Pierre,

Yes it can be done on the install with the advanced tab on the last screen before it actually starts to install. Or you can do it on a system that is already installed with the grub root and setup commands.

It might be helpful to read through the thread below. There is some good information in that thread that my help you understand how grub works a little better.

http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopi ... t&start=30

Fred

[lemonlime]

Pierre,
I have 6 Linux distributions on my computer. I have PCLinuxOS as my initial distribution at sda1 (hd0,0), and I boot from Grub which was installed on the MBR. I went to root in PCLinuxOS, opened Home, back arrowed to /boot, then to /grub. Grub has the "menu.lst". My menu.lst had Linux Mint on it, but it would not boot after I had installed Felicia. So I added the chainloader portion I listed in my previous reply. I saved the new menu.lst, and that is what the operating system goes to for your boot-up screen. That pointed Grub to the partition I had installed Felicia on, and I was presented with a Grub boot menu that listed all the Linux Operating Systems I had installed on my computer. If I had installed Grub to the MBR, it would have replaced the existing boot menu, but would have given me the same boot choices with Linux Mint 6.0 as the first choice.

You may want to save your original menu.lst as menu2.lst or something you would recognize as the original, in case your computer does not boot correctly, and you want to return the original menu.lst (just for safety). I usually copy and paste my menu.lst to a word processing or writing program, and put it in my Documents file. Then I can refer to it if I need to make changes or to see how the boot system works.

Hopefully this helps.
John