Squeeze(mate) & LMDE boot problem: similar entry in grub

[5au1]

Hi,

I installed LMDE along with Debian Squeeze (with MATE only). In the latter I had some problems with the display manager (http://forums.mate-desktop.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=125) that I believe caused the problem. From what I remember, after I installed LigthDM I booted in Debian without problem but when I tried to boot into LMDE I ended up with a frozen welcome screen (no mouse, and no reponse for alt+f1). Searching on the internet I found and tried various solutions, like updating grub, reinstalling grub. After reboot a strange thing happened, the menu showed a simmilar entry for both distros; something like

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LinuxMint GNU/Linux, with Linux 3.2.0-2-amd64
LinuxMint GNU/Linux, with Linux 3.2.0-2-amd64 (recovery mode)
LinuxMint GNU/Linux, with Linux 2.6.39-2-amd64
LinuxMint GNU/Linux, with Linux 2.6.39-2-amd64 (recovery mode)
LinuxMint GNU/Linux, with Linux 3.2.0-2-amd64 (on /dev/sda6) #This is where Debian is installed
LinuxMint GNU/Linux, with Linux 3.2.0-2-amd64 (recovery mode) (on /dev/sda6)

Beside this, the result was the same, when I booted the wrong system (in the above case Debian) I ended with a frozen screen.

Next I tried to solve this with an old version of Rescatux, and that's when I started to really mess up my system Depending on which system I choosed as the main one (as explained in the help menu of Rescatux) the grub menu above was reversed, i.e. Debian booted correctly and the LMDE appeared as:

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Debian wheezy, with Linux 3.0.0-1-amd64 (on /dev/sda5) 

At some point I just couldn't boot any of them, I ended with a grub rescue prompt.

After this I tried to go back to the previous situation booting the live-cd of LMDE and installing grub on /dev/sda but nothing happend, well, nothing good because other problems appeared (the sector 32 FlexNet issue and a error in cylinder boundary). In the past few hours, luckly I made some progress. I booted the Mint 12 live-cd, and restored grub with boot-rescue as explained in http://ubuntuisit.blogspot.com/2011/06/ ... buntu.html

Now I'm back to my first problem. I have similar entries for both distros. Interesting when I type update-grub I get

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Generating grub.cfg ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-2-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-2-amd64
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-1-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-1-amd64
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.39-2-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.39-2-amd64
Found Debian GNU/Linux (wheezy/sid) on /dev/sda6
done

but the actual grub menu is like the one above.

Any suggestion?

Regards

Saúl

P.S. First, Sorry for such a long-winded post. Second, information about my system is in the output from boot-rescue http://paste.ubuntu.com/918176/

[wayne128]

reading from your decriptions, I get confusion on how you install, repair and reinstall grub.
you have Debian on sda6 and LMDE on sda1.
later you use Mint12 Live CD to repair.. oop, I do not know if this is a good way. usually I would use LMDE CD to repair LMDE, Debian CD to repair Debian partition and so on.

Now that your system appear to be showing 'wrong' OS when you select from grub menu, perhaps you should just go back to starting point.

1. Start from LMDE on sda1,
now use LMDE CD, run live, open terminal, do these command:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

check that there is no error. If error, capture and post here.

2. DO a command below and post terminal result.

sudo os-prober

3. check what is the kernel you are running by
uname -r

4. reboot
hopefully you get the proper boot to LMDE
capture and post what grub menu shows.
we expect LMDE to have proper grub entry on all kernels and mem test.

We shall deal with Debian later, one step at a time.

[5au1]

Thanks for the reply,

Regarding the confusions, I set sda1 as a boot partition, sda5 for LMDE and sda6 for Debian. The first attempts I used LMDE with the command that you mention, however my mistakes were that (don't remember the exact order, nor the times I did it) I mounted the LMDE partition with and without the boot partition, then, on a next try mounted the Debian partition, also with and without the boot one. From what I can remember one of my last attempts I installed grub into sda1, but then I purged it from a recovery session. Just before that I was able to boot at least one system, but then nothing.

The reason I finally reinstalled grub from a Mint 12 cd was that I found boot-recovery, which is an ubuntu application (that does practically everything by itself), thus I thought that it would be better to install it within a live-session of an ubuntu-based system. Fortunately it did the trick, well at least in part; now I'm able to boot LMDE but no luck with Debian. The output from update-grub I posted is the one I get now on LMDE.

Now that I have one system running I'm in the process of backing up any file from those partitions and at the same time upgrading to the update pack 4 (which is going to take a while). After the upgrade I will try the os-probe command that you mention. I think it wasn't installed in Debian (another possible cause for the problem?)...

Regards

[Oscar799]

Moved here by moderator

[5au1]

Hi,

During the installation of the update pack I finished backing up my files to an external drive. That's when I forget about the kernel (2.x) issue when removing an external drive which causes a panic, and I interrupted the update and broke the system again. This finally convinced me that the best way to solve this was to reinstall the whole system. I'm pretty sure that sharing a boot partition across distros was the cause of the problem, a thing that I take care of when re-installing. Now I have both systems running with no problems.

Cheers,

P.S. For the record, just before the system broke, the os-prober command showed Debian Wheezy as the only system. Weird, because the grub menu showed multiple entries for Linux Mint