2 hard drives with W2000, XP & PCLinuxOS (SOLVED)

[ln2009]

Hi,

Please bear with me as I am a total noob to Linux.  I have W2000 & WinXP installed on my first hard drive in a dual boot configuration.  I installed PCLinuxOS on an empty second hard drive.  I did not want to mess up my Windows installs so, after reading many posts on the net, I let PCLOS install GRUB on the "/" partition on the 2nd drive.  It asked me where I booted from and I pointed to my Windows Primary partition.  I was hoping I could launch PCLOS from the Windows bootloader, but when I rebooted, PCLOS did not appear.

So here's what I am thinking.  I may be able to add PCLOS to the Windows boot.ini file.  But will Windows recognize the PCLOS partition?  And how would I do it?  Or maybe I should let GRUB somehow handle choosing the OS to run, e.g. installing GRUB on the 2nd drive's MBR, or even replacing the Windows loader on the 1st drive.  I need a recommendation and a step by step way to do this.  I've read something about chain loading, but don't know how it is implemented.  Be aware that I also plan to try a couple of other distro's on the 2nd hard drive.

[mikej]

What you could do when installing PCLOS on the second drive, is to let it install grub to the mbr on the first primary drive. It will detect your two windows installs on that drive as well as pclos on the second drive.

[ln2009]

What you could do when installing PCLOS on the second drive, is to let it install grub to the mbr on the first primary drive. It will detect your two windows installs on that drive as well as pclos on the second drive.

Any possibility it would hose my Windows installs?  Windows is all on NTFS, is that OK?  Also, would I have to re-install PCLOS or is there some way to just "move" grub over to the first drive's MBR?

Thanks for the quick response.

[Old-Polack]

What you could do when installing PCLOS on the second drive, is to let it install grub to the mbr on the first primary drive. It will detect your two windows installs on that drive as well as pclos on the second drive.

Any possibility it would hose my Windows installs?  Windows is all on NTFS, is that OK?  Also, would I have to re-install PCLOS or is there some way to just "move" grub over to the first drive's MBR?

Thanks for the quick response.

You are far better off installing grub to the MBR of the second drive, leaving the Windows hard drive untouched. If your BIOS allows choosing which drive to boot from, choose the Linux drive. If your BIOS does not allow choice of boot drives, you may have to physically change the drive order. The grub menu.lst will have a stanza to boot the windows drive, but you may have to edit that, as you already completed the installation.

You can reinstall grub from the liveCD, without having to reinstall the OS.

[ln2009]

You can reinstall grub from the liveCD, without having to reinstall the OS.

Pardon my ignorance here, I booted to the liveCD, where do I reinstall grub?  Is it the Re-do MBR utility?  What happens to the grub I installed on the "/" partition?

Thanks again for your patience.

[Old-Polack]

You can reinstall grub from the liveCD, without having to reinstall the OS.

Pardon my ignorance here, I booted to the liveCD, where do I reinstall grub?  Is it the Re-do MBR utility?  What happens to the grub I installed on the "/" partition?

Thanks again for your patience.

Re-do MBR will do fine. The grub on the / partition is fine where it's at; it will just be ignored, which harms nothing.

[ln2009]

Re-do MBR will do fine. The grub on the / partition is fine where it's at; it will just be ignored, which harms nothing.

OK, I start the Re-do MBR and get the following msg:  "The bootloader configuration of the chosen partition will be displayed.  You can edit the configuration and save your changes.  You will be asked if you want to recreate your bootloader."

I assume it's picking the right partition.  I then click OK and get the following menu.lst file:

timeout 10
color black/cyan yellow/cyan
gfxmenu (hd1,5)/boot/gfxmenu
default 0

title linux
kernel (hd1,5)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=UUID=554163b4-5336-4e5e-91a8-48483cf93946  acpi=on resume=UUID=cbca793f-6103-4866-8b17-be724f53a140 splash=silent vga=788
initrd (hd1,5)/boot/initrd.img

title linux-nonfb
kernel (hd1,5)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux-nonfb root=UUID=554163b4-5336-4e5e-91a8-48483cf93946  acpi=on resume=UUID=cbca793f-6103-4866-8b17-be724f53a140
initrd (hd1,5)/boot/initrd.img

title failsafe
kernel (hd1,5)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=failsafe root=UUID=554163b4-5336-4e5e-91a8-48483cf93946  failsafe acpi=on
initrd (hd1,5)/boot/initrd.img

title windows
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Do I have to edit this file?  Since I don't know what I'm doing, I closed this out and got msg "Do you want to reset your bootloader?  I'm not sure if this is where I should click YES, but I clicked NO for now.

Eagerly awaiting further instructions.  Thanks

[Old-Polack]

ln2009:

The Windows stanza should be as follows;

title Windows
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

so yes it needs to be edited. Also, in the Linux stanzas, each (hd1,5) instance will need to be changed to (hd0,5) as the Linux drive will become (hd0) when it becomes the boot drive.

When you are done, your menu.lst should look like this;

timeout 10
color black/cyan yellow/cyan
gfxmenu (hd0,5)/boot/gfxmenu
default 0

title linux
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=UUID=554163b4-5336-4e5e-91a8-48483cf93946  acpi=on resume=UUID=cbca793f-6103-4866-8b17-be724f53a140 splash=silent vga=788
initrd (hd0,5)/boot/initrd.img

title linux-nonfb
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux-nonfb root=UUID=554163b4-5336-4e5e-91a8-48483cf93946  acpi=on resume=UUID=cbca793f-6103-4866-8b17-be724f53a140
initrd (hd0,5)/boot/initrd.img

title failsafe
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=failsafe root=UUID=554163b4-5336-4e5e-91a8-48483cf93946  failsafe acpi=on
initrd (hd0,5)/boot/initrd.img

title Windows
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Watch for line wrap. In the actual document, each Linux stanza will consist of only three lines, in this form;

title <whatever>
kernel <whatever>
initrd <whatever>

[ln2009]

ln2009:

The Windows stanza should be as follows;

title Windows
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

so yes it needs to be edited. Also, in the Linux stanzas, each (hd1,5) instance will need to be changed to (hd0,5) as the Linux drive will become (hd0) when it becomes the boot drive.

When you are done, your menu.lst should look like this;

timeout 10
color black/cyan yellow/cyan
gfxmenu (hd0,5)/boot/gfxmenu
default 0

title linux
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=UUID=554163b4-5336-4e5e-91a8-48483cf93946  acpi=on resume=UUID=cbca793f-6103-4866-8b17-be724f53a140 splash=silent vga=788
initrd (hd0,5)/boot/initrd.img

title linux-nonfb
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux-nonfb root=UUID=554163b4-5336-4e5e-91a8-48483cf93946  acpi=on resume=UUID=cbca793f-6103-4866-8b17-be724f53a140
initrd (hd0,5)/boot/initrd.img

title failsafe
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=failsafe root=UUID=554163b4-5336-4e5e-91a8-48483cf93946  failsafe acpi=on
initrd (hd0,5)/boot/initrd.img

title Windows
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Watch for line wrap. In the actual document, each Linux stanza will consist of only three lines, in this form;

title <whatever>
kernel <whatever>
initrd <whatever>

I made the changes and let it reset the bootloader.  I swapped the boot order in the BIOS to boot the 2nd hard drive (with PCLOS) first.  But when I rebooted it hung up after POST.  Booted from liveCD and checked the menu.lst file again to be sure I didn't make any mistakes.  Not sure what's wrong.  Did the "reset bootloader" actually write to the MBR on that drive, or just change the menu.lst file on the "/" partition?

[Old-Polack]

ln2009:

I don't know what "reset bootloader" means. If it just reloaded to the partition, that's the problem; it needs to be installed to the MBR of the Linux drive.

I'm more familiar with using grub itself to do the installation. Try this.

Boot to the liveCD, log in as root, open a terminal and enter;

[root@localhost ~]# grub                           <Enter>

    GNU GRUB  version 0.97  (640K lower / 3072K upper memory)

 [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported.  For the first word, TAB
   lists possible command completions.  Anywhere else TAB lists the possible
   completions of a device/filename. ]

grub> find /boot/grub/stage2                       <Enter>
 (hd0,5)

grub> root (hd0,5)                                       <Enter>
 Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

grub> setup (hd0)                                       <Enter>   
 Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes
 Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes
 Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
 Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"...  17 sectors are embedded.
succeeded
 Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+17 p (hd0,5)/boot/grub/stage2 /boot/grub/menu.lst"... succeeded
Done.

grub> quit                                   <Enter>

[root@localhost ~]#

You will see a message;

Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.

between the prompt with the grub command and the new prompt. Ignore it, as it occurred while grub was loading, and means nothing now.

These are the commands, and the printout to my terminal, as I just reinstalled grub to my MBR. It's that simple. Yours should be exactly the same.

[Xenaflux]

if every thing else fails, you may do some reading here

http://gag.sourceforge.net/

It's just another way of doing things and very little to learn.
If you stick with OP , you learn something

Xena

[ln2009]

ln2009:

I don't know what "reset bootloader" means. If it just reloaded to the partition, that's the problem; it needs to be installed to the MBR of the Linux drive.

I'm more familiar with using grub itself to do the installation. Try this.

Boot to the liveCD, log in as root, open a terminal and enter;

[root@localhost ~]# grub                           <Enter>

    GNU GRUB  version 0.97  (640K lower / 3072K upper memory)

 [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported.  For the first word, TAB
   lists possible command completions.  Anywhere else TAB lists the possible
   completions of a device/filename. ]

grub> find /boot/grub/stage2                       <Enter>
 (hd0,5)

grub> root (hd0,5)                                       <Enter>
 Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

grub> setup (hd0)                                       <Enter>   
 Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes
 Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes
 Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
 Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"...  17 sectors are embedded.
succeeded
 Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+17 p (hd0,5)/boot/grub/stage2 /boot/grub/menu.lst"... succeeded
Done.

grub> quit                                   <Enter>

[root@localhost ~]#

You will see a message;

Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.

between the prompt with the grub command and the new prompt. Ignore it, as it occurred while grub was loading, and means nothing now.

These are the commands, and the printout to my terminal, as I just reinstalled grub to my MBR. It's that simple. Yours should be exactly the same.

YES!!  You are a genius!  That worked perfectly.  Only difference from above, in mine it came up 19 sectors instead of 17 sectors.  I can now boot PCLOS or boot into Windows boot manager to boot into 2000 or XP.  Great!

I understand the "concept" of what you did but am totally unfamiliar with Linux terminals.  I go back to the old DOS days but am going to try to learn Linux commands over time since, in general, I prefer using a command line over gui's.

Thanks for all your help with this.

[ln2009]

if every thing else fails, you may do some reading here

http://gag.sourceforge.net/

It's just another way of doing things and very little to learn.
If you stick with OP , you learn something

Xena

Thanks Xena for that tip.  Looks like a great boot manager and something to keep in mind for the future.  As you can see, I followed Old-Polack's script and it solved my problem.  So am a happy camper now.