Sticky GRUB problem

[Tony Arnold]

Frank,

On Sat, 2006-09-23 at 14:13 -0400, Frank McCormick wrote:
> Somewhat of a confusing problem but try to follow along with me :)
> 
> I have Dapper on one partition (hda3) and Edgy on another (hda2). GRUB is in the MBR. Whenever the Dapper kernel is upgraded, GRUB updates the menu.lst in Dapper, but 
> not in /boot/grub in EDGY, so I have to manually add the new kernel to the EDGY menu.lst. As a matter of fact because GRUB is in the MBR, the Dapper menu.lst is not even referenced. It's there because GRUB used to be in the partition.
> 
> Is there a way around this manual cut/pasting?

I think the real answer to this is to have a separate partition
for /boot which is common to both Dapper and Edgy (note, I've never
tried this).

At the moment, you have two copies of /boot, one in the Dapper partition
and one in the Edgy partition. When you upgrade Edgy, it will update the
menu.lst stuff in its /boot, if you upgrade Dapper it will do the same
in its /boot.

You should be able to have a single /boot partition. You will have
images for both Dapper and Edgy in there and a long grub menu allowing
you to boot from any one of these.

Like I say, never tried it and I don't know if there are any gotchas. Of
course, it means (probably) re-installing everything and re-partitioning
which you maybe do not want to do!

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
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E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold