How to install Grub in sda20?

[searcher1]

I share my computer with the rest of my family and there are many partitions in the HDD. I created sda20 for LMDE / and sda21 for LMDE /home and I would like to install Grub in sda20. However during the installation process when I reached the page for the Grub installation, I am presented with /dev/sda and no other choice.

Is there any way around this or has my DVD been wrongly burnt? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[JasonLG]

I share my computer with the rest of my family and there are many partitions in the HDD. I created sda20 for LMDE / and sda21 for LMDE /home and I would like to install Grub in sda20. However during the installation process when I reached the page for the Grub installation, I am presented with /dev/sda and no other choice.

Is there any way around this or has my DVD been wrongly burnt? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

GRUB(the first stage any way) is installed in the Master Boot Record which located at the very beginning of your hard drive. /dev/sda is the correct place to install it if you want to boot an OS that resides any where on your sda hard drive. You are not presented with any other choices because I assume you only have one physical hard drive.

Reading the Wikipedia article on GRUB wouldn't be a bad idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRUB

[altair4]

In it's current incarnation there is no way to specify where grub will be installed except in the Master Boot Record of your available drives. Curiously, after installation and upon the first update an new grub will be downloaded and as part of the installation of the new grub you will again be asked where you want to install Grub. At that point you can specify that you want it to be installed in /sda20. It's a little late at that point because the damage has already been done.

Hopefully a LMDE 2.0 will be released in the future that will have this feature already included in the initial installer.

[firefighter]

searcher1,

I had a similar issue and found a work around to the problem. You can read my post here:

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=141&t=55030

No quite the same as yours (different location on hard drive), but pretty close. Hope that helps!

Firefighter

[searcher1]

Thanks for the replies. Good to know my DVD was burnt correctly.

I am now thinking of installing without Grub and then installing Grub manually into the / partition. I don't know if this will work but it's worth a try.

Alternatively I can wait until a new version of LMDE is released with this problem fixed. I will have to give this some more thought.

Thanks again for all the suggestions.

[vincent]

Yes, you should be able to opt not to install Grub; however, do remember to run "sudo update-grub" in the Linux distro from which you installed Grub into the MBR, otherwise you won't see LMDE in your Grub menu during bootup.

GRUB(the first stage any way) is installed in the Master Boot Record which located at the very beginning of your hard drive. /dev/sda is the correct place to install it if you want to boot an OS that resides any where on your sda hard drive. You are not presented with any other choices because I assume you only have one physical hard drive.

No, Grub does not have to be installed in the MBR. You could be using LILO, GAG, or even Windows' own boot manager...for the latter two, you would then have to chainload to Grub in order to boot Linux. Point is, something has to be installed into the MBR, but it certainly doesn't have to be Grub. Granted, most people are going to be using Grub and have it installed in the MBR, but it's up to the individual user to decide.

[searcher1]

Thanks for the reply. I am using Legacy Grub in my MBR and I have already edited the menu.lst file to include LMDE. In fact I had everything prepared for LMDE before I tried installing it...

[JasonLG]

Yes, you should be able to opt not to install Grub; however, do remember to run "sudo update-grub" in the Linux distro from which you installed Grub into the MBR, otherwise you won't see LMDE in your Grub menu during bootup.

GRUB(the first stage any way) is installed in the Master Boot Record which located at the very beginning of your hard drive. /dev/sda is the correct place to install it if you want to boot an OS that resides any where on your sda hard drive. You are not presented with any other choices because I assume you only have one physical hard drive.

No, Grub does not have to be installed in the MBR. You could be using LILO, GAG, or even Windows' own boot manager...for the latter two, you would then have to chainload to Grub in order to boot Linux. Point is, something has to be installed into the MBR, but it certainly doesn't have to be Grub. Granted, most people are going to be using Grub and have it installed in the MBR, but it's up to the individual user to decide.

I realize that other bootloaders can be used but the OP wasn't asking about that. The question was in LMDE by default is there a way to place grub on sda20 at install time, and the answer is no just like I explained.