Booting from different HDD for 'new' Mint 10 vs old Mint 8.

[MarkusR]

I have Mint 8 (Gloria) on an extended partition on sda. sda also has a windows partition as only primary partition. Extended partition has some random partitions, plus Win7.
Mint 10 is on sdb. sdb is loaded with partitions. Some very disposable.

grub2 under Mint 8 is currently the loader for all. It updates and installs no problem, with absolutely no errors or warnings.
grub2 under Mint 10 is one I'd rather use, but when I run

Code: Select all

sudo grub-install /dev/sda

it gives warnings and errors about lack of MBR size, not being able to embed, and having to use blocklists. This is strange to me because grub8 under Mint8 didn't seem to have this problem.

Do I need to create a BIOS boot partition on sda? or sdb? Or can I stick something into MBR, and stick a boot partition on sdb? Or can I specify an existing Linux partition on sda to contain the files?

It seems there are ways to make it work, but I'm having a hard time coming up with the ideal one.

[jk121960]

Hi, If I was you I would move to a seperate boot partition, install grub from your Mint 10 version, that will make it use that grub, also run your mkconfig from there also. If you google there are many articles that give good information. For the seperate partition the important part is when you install grub, use this form. 'sudo grub-install –root-directory=/media/grub2 /dev/sda' correct partition names as you need. As you can see the grub2 reference is your seperate partition and the the second argument is your MBR. I don't understand the MBR size problem you may want to run windows boot disk and run /fixmbr from repair to see if that fixes it. You will however now have to reinstall grub at that point but that can be done from a live disk.

--jerry