New installation failing to take over from old installation

[Aere Greenway]

Chris:

I read the rest of this e-mail string, and I'm glad you puzzled out the
cause of the problem, and got it working.  

Your statement about not seeing anywhere to specify where GRUB is
installed is significant.  

I suspect, that for normal/typical installs, you may not get any choice
about it, so if it doesn't make the right choice, the installation will
fail, as yours did initially.  

I assumed this choice was always available, because it has always been
there for me.  

But the reason it's always been there for me, is that I always do a
manual install.  Namely, when it asks you what type of install
(side-by-side, guided, whole disk, or other), I always choose "other",
which is a manual install, allowing you to choose the partitioning, and
more importantly, to choose where GRUB is installed.  

I choose manual partitioning because I have at least two Linux
partitions, for a primary Linux system (the one I'm currently using),
and an old Linux partition (the one I used to use).  

When I install a new Linux system, I install it over (replacing) my
'old' Linux partition.  After installing it, I copy the files in my home
directory of my primary Linux partition to the home directory of the new
system.  

I then experiment with the new Linux system, and when I am convinced I
can do everything I use my computer for, on the new system, I "transfer
my flag" to the new system, making it my primary Linux system, and what
used to be my primary Linux system becomes the "old" Linux system, which
remains available in case something were to happen to my new "primary"
Linux system.  

There have been occasions when I have "transferred my flag back" to the
former system, until I worked out problems with the new system.  

Where I have multiple Linux partitions on my machine (and also, in many
cases, a Windows partition), I have another partition, formatted as
FAT32, which is visible to all of the partitions.  My music library, and
photos are on that partition, and thus can be used regardless which
partition I am using.  

With all that being said, I adopted the above process back when
upgrading to a new system level was a very risky process, that failed
more often than it succeeded.  

Since 12.04, I have again tried the upgrade process, and it has worked
every time, so I am thinking of changing my process to rely entirely on
upgrading (along with total backup of my home directory).  A good thing
about upgrading, is that you don't have to re-install all the special
software packages you use.  

-- 


Sincerely,
Aere


-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Green <cl at isbd.net>
To: lubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
Subject: Re: New installation failing to take over from old installation
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2013 10:32:14 +0000


On Wed, Jan 02, 2013 at 04:46:30PM -0700, Aere Greenway wrote:
>    Chris:
> 
>    I am far from an expert on this, but my recent experience seems to
>    indicate you need to put GRUB on the disk that automatically gets booted
>    from. 
> 
>    I have often seen the installer recommend putting it on the secondary
>    drive, which doesn't work. You can't just use what the installer
>    suggests. 
> 
>    What you describe suggests that the installation process put your new GRUB
>    on the other drive, and when you booted, it went to the old GRUB, which
>    was left untouched on the first drive, but where it pointed was no longer
>    a system.   
> 
That's much what I think too but I'm not sure I was given the
opportunity to decide where to put Grub.  I guess I can try once more
(third time lucky!) and concentrate hard on the Grub installation
questions when they come up.

-- 
Chris Green

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