Grub 2 in Jaunty/Karmic can break double boot configuration

[Siggy Brentrup]

On Sat, Oct 03, 2009 at 22:09 -0700, NoOp wrote:
> On 10/02/2009 10:13 PM, Lucio M Nicolosi wrote:
> > On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 12:05 AM, NoOp <snip> wrote:
> ...
> >> Tomorrow I'll pull out my other test system that has jaunty drives on it
> >> & test the 'upgrade' to see what I discover. I'll also reinstall the
> >> Alpha 6 drive with a clean Beta to see what I find.
> >>
> >> Hopefully we (karmic users/testers) can help sort out some of the issues
> >> before the final release so that other/new users won't bork their
> >> systems :-)
> >>
> >> Thanks again for taking the time to providing the details/info.
> >>
> >> Gary
> > 
> > 
> > Gary,
> > 
> > I followed your thread when posted, thanks.
> > 
> > Although a similar bug was present on some alpha versions (Karmic
> > install crash in the presence of another OS) apparently it has already
> > been addressed. I'm kind of puzzled. Could a fresh install on (hd0,0)
> > still crash if another OS or probably grub1 is present? I can't even
> > figure if I'm really facing a bug.
> > 
> > Except for the missing grub2, and the inability to reboot, my Karmic
> > install apparently went fine.

As long as you see a grub menu you should be able to boot anything on
your system with the help of grub's command language, see below for
how I did it.

> Today was: 1) Stanford/UCLA football game (Stanford won), 2) Cal/USC
> football game (Cal lost) & got home and couldn't figure out why I
> couldn't browse this system via Nautilus/Samba from my other systems.
>   Turns out I had enabled the UFW firewall on this system (playing with
> firewalls, is like playing with fire... you get burnt sometimes) & took
> me nearly two hours to figure out the problem by finally looking at
> 'sudo iptables -L' and that I really didn't need to do a 'sudo apt-get
> purge samba' after all.

Well, I guess all of us have our own success stories of wasting time
by looking in the wrong places :-\

> So, I shall gladly attempt to perform a 'karmic destroy' update on my
> jaunty test system tomorrow. That has to be easier than figuring out
> "simple" samba problems :-)

I did a fresh karmic install with / (more exactly seldom written stuff
under /) on a flash device while /boot, /tmp, /home & /var have their
own HD partitions.

The install worked fine (except for writes to the flash device being
sloooooow) until it came to removing grub and installing grub2 to make
the system bootable. Hitting Alt+F4 in the installer showed that
grub-installer was bound to fail because it used a wrong device
mapping.

At this point I decided to leave jaunty's grub untouched for now,
letting me boot jaunty as usual.

If you want to boot karmic which is installed in /dev/sdb1, hit 'c' as
soon as grub's menu shows up: you'll see grub's shell prompt; here TAB
completion is very helpful.

4 manually entered commands suffice to boot karmic:

 root (hd0,2)   # grub's notion of the /boot partition
 kernel /vmlinux-2.6.31-11-generic root=/dev/sdb1 vga=ask
 initrd /initrd.img-2.6.31-11-generic
 boot

That's all.

Siggy 
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