[SOLVED] Muitlipe PCLOS Installs

[Old-Polack]

I was looking for a previous post of old-polack's that showed how his partitions and boot menus were laid out. Haven't found it yet. What I did find was a short tutorial on chainloading one GRUB to another.

Trust me, they are a mess at the moment, from playing with various layouts and booting from direct stanzas from both the boot partitions and the individual installation partitions, as well as various chainload stanzas. When I get a 2 TB drive, I'll transfer some of the installations to it with rsync, and do a lot of clean up of the master menu.lst, as well as wipe the current 750 GB and 1 TB drives to start fresh with them again.

It's amazing how fast one can make a mess of a previously well organized setup when one is just playing.  

[Old-Polack]

Is it possible to chainload to another grub on a different harddrive?

Currently I have this entry.

title SSD
kernel (hd1,4)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=UUID=6d0239e7-ff31-4406-86bc-d755bf76682e  quiet nokmsboot vmalloc=256M acpi=on resume=UUID=959da3d8-9a3a-4fae-bb76-42174b417d4c splash=silent vga=788
initrd (hd1,4)/boot/initrd.img
savedefault
boot

Should be no problem. I do it. I've previously chainloaded to as many as 24 installations on 7 hard drives on the same computer. All it needs is to have grub installed on each partition one wishes to chainload to.

I'll try to put grub on the partition instead of the mbr of /dev/sdb.

It can be on both, if you wish, so you can choose /dev/sdb as the boot drive for a direct boot, or chainload when /dev/sda is the boot drive.

I have a boot partition on each of my hard drives, with grub installed to every MBR, so every drive can be the boot drive, any time I wish it to be. Each drive can be the only drive on a system, or one of a bunch. If any drive fails, any other can still boot the remaining installations on the rest of the drives.

[Texstar]

Is it possible to chainload to another grub on a different harddrive?

Currently I have this entry.

title SSD
kernel (hd1,4)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=UUID=6d0239e7-ff31-4406-86bc-d755bf76682e  quiet nokmsboot vmalloc=256M acpi=on resume=UUID=959da3d8-9a3a-4fae-bb76-42174b417d4c splash=silent vga=788
initrd (hd1,4)/boot/initrd.img
savedefault
boot

Should be no problem. I do it. I've previously chainloaded to as many as 24 installations on 7 hard drives on the same computer. All it needs is to have grub installed on each partition one wishes to chainload to.

I'll try to put grub on the partition instead of the mbr of /dev/sdb.

It can be on both, if you wish, so you can choose /dev/sdb as the boot drive for a direct boot, or chainload when /dev/sda is the boot drive.

I have a boot partition on each of my hard drives, with grub installed to every MBR, so every drive can be the boot drive, any time I wish it to be. Each drive can be the only drive on a system, or one of a bunch. If any drive fails, any other can still boot the remaining installations on the rest of the drives.

But Tony Danza wants to know the stanza.


I've tried different entries in my primary grub to chainload to grub on /dev/sdb and get error 13.

[old_guy]

It looks like a mess, but it works. Can chainload to sdb. The long entries are to OS's that use grub2 or other unusual setups.

timeout 4
color black/cyan yellow/cyan
gfxmenu (hd0,1)/boot/gfxmenu
default 0

title linux
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=/dev/sda2 quiet nokmsboot vmalloc=256M acpi=on resume=/dev/sda1 splash=silent vga=788
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd.img

title linux-nonfb
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux-nonfb root=/dev/sda2 quiet nokmsboot vmalloc=256M acpi=on resume=/dev/sda1
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd.img

title failsafe
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=failsafe root=/dev/sda2 quiet nokmsboot failsafe vmalloc=256M acpi=on
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd.img

title 2.6.38.8-pclos1.bfs
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.38.8-pclos1.bfs BOOT_IMAGE=2.6.38.8-pclos1.bfs root=/dev/sda2 quiet nokmsboot vmalloc=256M acpi=on resume=/dev/sda1 splash=silent vga=788
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd-2.6.38.8-pclos1.bfs.img

title 2.6.38.8-pclos3.pae.bfs
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.38.8-pclos3.pae.bfs BOOT_IMAGE=2.6.38.8-pclos3.pae.bfs root=/dev/sda2 quiet nokmsboot vmalloc=256M acpi=on resume=/dev/sda1 splash=silent vga=788
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd-2.6.38.8-pclos3.pae.bfs.img

title memtest
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/memtest-4.20 BOOT_IMAGE=memtest splash=silent

title Mini
root (hd0,2)
chainloader +1

title XFCE
root (hd0,4)
chainloader +1

title Zen Mini
root (hd0,5)
chainloader +1

title Edu
root (hd0,6)
chainloader +1

title UE 3.0 Lite
root (hd0,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.38-10-generic-pae root=/dev/sda8
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.38-10-generic-pae
savedefault
boot

title Zen Mini New
root (hd0,8)
chainloader +1

title UE 3.0 Lite Gamer
root (hd0,9)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.38-10-generic-pae root=/dev/sda10
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.38-10-generic-pae
savedefault
boot

title Puppy Linux 525 frugal in sda15 dir puppy525
rootnoverify (hd0,14)
kernel /puppy525/vmlinuz pmedia=atahd psubdir=puppy525
initrd /puppy525/initrd.gz

title Gnome
root (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

title UE 2.9
root (hd1,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-25-generic root=/dev/sdb5
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-25-generic
savedefault
boot

title 2010 Main
root (hd1,5)
chainloader +1

title LXDE
root (hd1,6)
chainloader +1

title SM
root (hd1,7)
chainloader +1

title Zen Edu
root (hd1,8)
chainloader +1

title New
root (hd1,9)
chainloader +1

title FM
root (hd1,10)
chainloader +1

title 2007 Bkup
kernel (hd1,11)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=PCLOS_2007_Updated root=/dev/sdb12 acpi=on splash=silent vga=788
initrd (hd1,11)/boot/initrd.img

title 64 Test 1
root (hd1,12)
chainloader +1

title 2010 (sdb6) bkup
root (hd1,13)
chainloader +1

title PartedMagic
root (hd1,14)
kernel /pmagic/bzImage noapic load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 rw vga=791 sleep=10 loglevel=0 keymap=us
initrd /pmagic/initramfs


Earl

[RobNJ]

Well, I'm not quite sure HOW I manged to do this, but.......

It WORKS!! 

Thanks everyone!