SOLVED--Problem with adding secondary hard drive

[jalcradus]

I have 2 hard drives in my computer--I'll call them Drive A and Drive B. Drive A has Windows Vista installed. It also has Linux Mint 7 installed under Windows using mint4win. I installed Linux Mint 7 on Drive B using the Live CD. Prior to doing so I disconnected the data cable from Drive A so it would not be recognized by the computer. I did this to avoid any issues with the boot sector of this drive being overwritten during the installation of Linux Mint on Drive B. I have had problems with this in the past when dealing with different Windows versions. So, when I installed Linux Mint on Drive B, it was the only drive in the computer, and Linux Mint was the only operating system installed on this drive. After installation I was able to boot into Linux Mint from this drive and everything worked perfectly.

I turned off the computer and re-connected Drive A. I booted the computer, went into the system setup utility and made sure that Drive B was set as the primary boot drive and Drive A was the secondary drive. Attempting to boot to Linux Mint from Drive B (with Drive A connected as a secondary drive) resulted in an error screen and the system would not boot into Linux Mint. The error screen was very long, possibly a series of several error messages, but the most significant part of it seems to be--"Target filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init." Disconnecting Drive A from the computer allows me to boot into Linux Mint from Drive B as before, with no problems. Connecting Drive A as a secondary drive results in the error screen. I can also reset Drive A to be the primary drive and boot into Windows normally, as well as the mint4win installation.

I used to use this same method of dual booting when I used Ubuntu 9.04 and it worked perfectly. By changing the boot order of the drives I could control which operating system would be loaded. Since Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu I would think this would work, but obviously something changed that causes it to fail.

I realize there are other ways to dual boot but I like this method as it is risk-free and allows me to use the full capacity of each drive. Does anyone have any idea what causes this and any way to make it work?

[Muzer]

OK, when you remove drive A, it changes the identify of drive B in Linux. Try this:

* Boot Mint via mint4win (if that is still set up)
* Mount drive B, and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst as root:

Code: Select all

gksu gedit /media/disk/boot/grub/menu.lst

(where /media/disk is the mountpoint of drive B)
Find these lines:

Code: Select all

title           Linux Mint 7 Gloria KDE, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=/dev/hda1 ro quiet splash

Replace "root=/dev/hda1" in the line starting kernel with the correct device of your hard drive - this will probably be root=/dev/hdb1
If it said sda1 instead of hda1 before, replace it with sdb1

[jalcradus]

Thanks Muzer! This worked.

[jalcradus]

UPDATE: I am no longer having this issue after I installed Linux Mint 8. I can add and remove hard drives and Linux Mint 8 will still boot if I specify the drive it is installed on as the first boot drive, with no additional configuration necessary. I'm guessing this is due to the new version of GRUB used in this release.