Dual system boot

[OldVic]

I'm using an old 2 drive SCSI computer to determine the distro for my working computer. After 8 different distros, I like PCLOS the best but I can't make a 2 system GRUB or LILO. All the other distros boot correctly when installed on either the first or second drive (they all give 2 choices). Using the same boot default on PCLOS (sda) it doesn't recognize Mandriva on the first drive. When booted, it then only gives the PCLOS choice. I tried adding the first drive to GRUB without success. I couldn't find anyone in this forum with the same problem. Since I really like PCLOS any help would be appreciated.

[ThirdOfSix]

My guess is that Old-Polack will be along shortly to help you.

In the meantime, could you perhaps give a little more detail on what your hardware is?

The phrase "old 2 drive SCSI computer" leads me to believe that maybe you have one of the machines that was originally sold as a server that only had actual SCSI drives rather than a newer machine that has SATA drives that Linux sees as SCSI.

If it is a machine with true SCSI drives, are both drives on the same SCSI interface or does it have a separate interface for each drive?

I ask because I seem to remember that each SCSI interface identifies the drives by position on the SCSI train only.

That could make a big difference in how the BIOS and Linux determine which drive is which.

[Old-Polack]

My guess is that Old-Polack will be along shortly to help you.

Thanks a lot. Maybe I wanted to be a jerk, and let this one slide, just to see OldVic suffer. Now I don't have that choice anymore.

In the meantime, could you perhaps give a little more detail on what your hardware is?

The phrase "old 2 drive SCSI computer" leads me to believe that maybe you have one of the machines that was originally sold as a server that only had actual SCSI drives rather than a newer machine that has SATA drives that Linux sees as SCSI.

If it is a machine with true SCSI drives, are both drives on the same SCSI interface or does it have a separate interface for each drive?

I ask because I seem to remember that each SCSI interface identifies the drives by position on the SCSI train only.

That could make a big difference in how the BIOS and Linux determine which drive is which.

While the above is helpful, if the machine has been working with two hard drives, for any length of time, and has had them be uniquely identified in the past, this should not be a problem.

OldVic:

It would be more helpful to see the results of fdisk -l, so we could see how the machine sees the various partitions.

[root@localhost ~]# fdisk -l       <Enter>  <-- That's a lower case L not a number 1.

Post your results.

Welcome to the forum.  Don't mind our little bits of craziness; that's how we keep ourselves sane around here.

[OldVic]

Thanks to ThirdOfSix and oldpolack. I have a true SCSI server with both drives on the same cable. Except for sda and sdb instead of hda and hdb all partitions act the same as other computers, with hd(0,0) and hd(1,0) defining the 2 drives. When I reinstalled Mandriva on the first drive the Grub did both distros. I then reinstalled PCLOS to the 2nd drive and again got only PCLOS. I then manually added the Mandriva data from the previous menu.lst. Choosing Mandriva ended with a "/dev doesn't exist" error. I found Super Grub and used it. It did see both distros and made a menu.lst where the last entry was PCLOS and it jumped to the menu.lst in disk 2. This worked to give me 2 programs. Now I have more confidence to try PCLOS with my WIN7 computer. I really didn't want the hassle of reinstalling Win7 - it's much faster to test with Linux programs.