Multiple grub menu.lst?

[Derek Broughton]

Charlie Zender wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> My hardy upgrade failed because it cannot find grub's new menu.lst.
> The computer boots with the _old_ (gutsy) menu.lst, not with the
> new (hardy) menu.lst. I checked and sure enough /boot/grub/menu.lst
> has the correct (hardy) kernels. But the boot menu shows the old
> menu.lst. It is booting from a menu.lst but not the one in /boot/grub.
> 
> I think /boot only mounts correctly after
> the (old gutsy) kernel boots. That is why I see the new menu.lst
> in /boot/grub. But before the kernel boots, it is finding the old
> menu.lst _somewhere_ and hence booting the old (gutsy) kernel.

No.  I'm not at all sure what _is_ happening, but what you're describing is
just not the way grub works.

Grub is finding the menu.lst in /boot/grub of the partition that was named
as the boot partition when you did (probably implicitly) "grub-install". 
Unless you have created a new /boot or / partition, it's still looking in
the same place.

> Weird, huh? This all traces back to brokeness that started when
> edgy switch from human-readable fstab entries to UUIDs.

OK, so the developers did a pretty poor job of advertising this change, but
trust me, you would have liked the results if they _hadn't_ changed your
fstab to use UUID a lot less.  And I really don't see a likely
connection... grub doesn't use either /dev names or UUIDs to find your
menu.lst.
-- 
derek