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Re: OT: Linus or annother Linus?
de Mark Warner 04/27/2006 12:16
tim wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 12:17:31 -0400, Mark Warner wrote:
>
>> tim wrote:
>>>
>>> Not anything that has to do with this question, but you look like
>>> someone who may know something :)
>>
>> Fooled you.
>
> :)
>
>>> I installed Mepis on the weekend, onto a spare ata 40 gig hd I had
>>> laying around. When asked where to install grub, I chose my sata 250
>>> gig so that I could also boot XP. Yowza, grub took out mbr/boot
>>> record, and I had to do a repair of XP to get back in to it.
>>>
>>> Grub is now on the ata 40 gig, but I can't for the life of me get it
>>> to let me boot up XP, even though it's listed in the menu. I'm
>>> getting tired of switching boot order in the bios to use either XP
>>> or Mepis.
>>>
>>> Any idea what I need to edit to get it to work?
>>
>> Just so I understand correctly... the GRUB bootloader that came up
>> did *not* list Windows as an option? >Yes, MEPIS would be the
>> default, but you should have had the option to arrow down to Windows
>> and boot to it.
>
> No. Grub did have my XP listed as a boot option. Mepis was
> default,Mepis Failsafe(?) second, Windows, and another Windows were
> third and fourth. No idea why Windows was listed twice.
>
>
>> Boot to the Live CD, login as "root"; click Install Me; chose to
>> reinstall GRUB; point it to the MBR on your primary drive (hda), and
>> tell it which is your Linux boot/root partition (presumeably hdb1,
>> the first partition on the secondary drive).
>
> I'm loath to do that again. My first installation of GRUB I chose
> sda1 as primary, which is the SATA 250 gig and my Windows drive, and
> had GRUB load from there. hda1 which is the linux drive, is the
> secondary. My choice there put me into an endless loop from post to
> black screen to reboot. Which left me to rebuild the boot record/mbr
> so that I could get back into Windows. Which allowed me to reinstall
> Mepis again and try to make a better choice with GRUB.
>
> GRUB is now on hda1. It sees sda1, and has Windows (twice) listed.
> However, I still cannot boot Windows using GRUB. I got a couple of
> different GRUB error messages. One was a bios error message, and the
> other not a really helpful one.
>
>> You can edit the bootloader in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file with
>> Kwrite (as root):
>>
>> su kwrite /boot/grub/menu.lst
>> Each section or "stanza" contains the boot information for each OS
>> that GRUB detected when installed. MEPIS will be at the top of the
>> list. If you want Windows to be the default, you can move it to the
>> top of the list with a simple cut/paste. You can also change the
>> timeout setting (# of seconds before the default OS is booted) in
>> this file.
>
> I managed to find that, and some information out there on the www
> about editing menu.lst. It seems that my editing has now rendered my
> Windows drive non functional again. Or else Grub just wants to be in
> control. I can't boot to Windows even after setting my bios to boot
> only from SCSI, which is the SATA drive. Mepis works really good
> though :) I may even get used to Pan.
Didn't catch that you had an SATA drive in your earlier post... dunno if
that has any bearing on your problem; I have no experience with SATA.
I claim no expertise regarding GRUB. I understand that it's a powerful
tool that will allow you to do a multitude of things. Again, I don't
have any particular insights; the defaults have always worked for me. A
trip to one of the *.os.linux.* newsgroups would probably be worthwhile.
Or a post to the mepislovers.org forums.
This is kind of a half-assed workaround, but you could boot the live CD
and install GRUB to a floppy. Then, when you want to boot MEPIS, just
boot to the floppy first, and go from there.
--
Mark Warner
lose .inhibitions when replying