Re: Ubuntu

Beartooth wrote:

On Sun, 27 Jan 2008 11:48:16 -0700, Karl Larsen wrote:

I have tried to load this software as another to keep an eye on, but

                                     ^^^^^^^^^^^

when I do load it it takes over Grub! I didn't see any way to stop it
from doing this. Has anyone else had success? If so let me know what to
do.

I take that to mean what you really have is neither a straight Fedora problem, nor a straight Ubuntu problem, but a multi-boot problem involving both. Right?

After much effort and with lots of help online, I have just managed to make my testbed machine triple-boot, reliably, with Fedora 8, Ubuntu 7.10, and CentOS 5.1; I'm not quite sure what I did, nor how, but I can outline it.

First, back up your data; the next step will wipe *everything* -- leaving you with not even an OS.

Now download and burn a CD with DBAN, boot to it, and tell it autonuke. It will take several hours.

Then partition the hard drive; use knoppix, or gparted or qtparted on a live CD. I made a separate /boot partition first, then one for each OS, and a swap partition. Boot from the install medium for the first OS; do the manual install, making sure you install only into the partition you want; let it build you a grubbery in /boot. I did CentOS first. Make a note of what in in any grub.conf a/o menu.lst you can find.

Install gparted or qtparted or both in each OS as you go -- not to partition with, but to look with. Keeping track of what's on which partition is going to grow into a major pain.

Now do the like with the second OS -- I used Fedora. It will probably wreck your ability to boot to the first one.

So boot to what you can, and command mkdir /TEST. Then start running "mount -t ext3 /dev/sdax /TEST" for x = 1 to whatever your last partition is. (In CentOS and Ubuntu, use hda, not sda.)

Whenever a partition does mount, do "cd /TEST," then ls, and drill down to find any grub.conf a/o menu.lst in any OS but the one you're running.

In another terminal or terminal tab, su to root, and do the same inside the one you're running.

Copy and paste, adding each OS's boot data to the boot record for the other. It should now boot to both.

If you add a third, as I did, expect it to wreck your ability to boot to at least one of the others. Apply a similar remedy.

As I said, I'm not sure; I *think* the above is what I did. But I notice that what's in /boot is *not* all the boot data, but that for one OS (the last, iirc), and some directions to chainload.

You may have to do something similar to all the above *again* whenever one OS updates its kernel. Or the chainloading from the dedicated /boot partition may spare you that. Be sure at least that you do save the boot data for the new kernel, where you can get to ti even if not to its OS.

It's not pretty; but if you put the testbed -- *after* all the installing -- behind a KVM switch along with your main machine, it's very convenient once it's running.

   If it takes over over (hd0) I can just re-direct it to it's partition.

Karl


--

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
  PGP 4208 4D6E 595F 22B9 FF1C  ECB6 4A3C 2C54 FE23 53A7