[Novalug] VDQ Grub (cleverness, wages of)

Beartooth karhunhammas@Lserv.com
Mon Jan 15 10:50:43 EST 2007


 	"There are many forms of stupidity, and cleverness is not 
the best of them." I've been hunting a citation for that for 
thirty-odd years in vain; but it remains true.

 	I tried installing CentOS on my old P2, thinking it the 
perfect expendable machine to fool with. Since I was in that 
mood, I even tried manual partitioning; and when I discovered it 
was letting me choose either or both of the hard drives, I chose 
hda and left hdb blank (i.e., dbanned). That worked fine : the 
hardware browser saw the other drive, but Centos did not 
otherwise.

 	So then I got out my trusty FC6 CDs, and tried to put it 
on hdb -- and I'm pretty sure I did. But grub didn't find it.

 	So I configured a mailer, and mailed myself the grub.conf 
from a machine that dual-boots to FC6 and XP. When I had it on 
the P2, I copied the first Fedora entry, and pasted it into the 
grub.conf in CentOS. No joy.

 	What I now have is this :

[root@localhost btth]# cat /etc/grub.conf
  # grub.conf generated by anaconda
  #
  # Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes
  to this file
  # NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
  #          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/,
  eg.
  #          root (hd0,0)
  #          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda9
  #          initrd /initrd-version.img
  #boot=/dev/hda
  default=0
  timeout=5
  splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
  hiddenmenu
  title CentOS (2.6.9-42.0.3.EL)
          root (hd0,0)
          kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL ro root=LABEL=/
          initrd /initrd-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL.img
  title CentOS-4 i386 (2.6.9-42.EL)
          root (hd0,0)
          kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-42.EL ro root=LABEL=/
          initrd /initrd-2.6.9-42.EL.img
  title Fedora Core (2.6.18-1.2869.fc6)
           root (hd1,0)
           kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2869.fc6 ro root=LABEL=/
           initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-1.2869.fc6.img
  [root@localhost btth]#

 	What am I messing up here?? (I've tried hd0,4 and a few 
others as FC root.)

 	Having read the fine manual (at least, as to partition 
designation), I *suspect* maybe what has happened is that there 
is no boot info for Fedora where it oughtta be -- and that the 
easiest remedy would be simply to get out my install CDs for 
Fedora and try again. (All I have on that drive so far is an 
hour or two's worth of tweaking, setting up panels, one-click 
opening, etc.)

 	If so, what do I watch out for during install? Let FC do 
its automatic partitioning, and trust it to preserve CentOS? Or 
....??

-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, Neo-Redneck, Double Retiree,
Not Quite Clueless Linux Power User 
I have precious (very precious) little idea where up is.



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