Grub2 problem - can only boot to 2 of 3 OS's

[Liam Proven]

On Fri, 29 May 2020 at 16:31, jim <jf_byrnes at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> I haven't done this in a while and did not think it would cause any
> problems.


Out of order disks partitions are a bad thing, but probably not fatal.
Not ideal, though.

> I'm not sure the installation "asked me", but when I partitioned I chose
> /. Frankly I was sort of on autopilot, I made the choices I remember
> making other times.

That is a _very_ bad mindset when you're trying to set up
triple-boot... but I think you may have worked that out by now.

As Colin said, I think you should confine your experiments to VMs for
an easier life.

> I tried this from both sda1 - Ubuntu 18.4 and sda3 - Mint18.3 and got
> this result both times:

Oh dear gods, don't do it for ALL of them! :-o

As I said: leave your main, primary OS in control of the MBR. You have
not said which that is. If there isn't an obvious candidate, then pick
one and stick to it.

Then put the _others_ in their respective root partitions.

FFS don't try to put _all_ of them in their root partitions or nothing
will be in control and it might not boot.

> This error puzzles me because using the Disks utility all of them are
> reported as Ext4(Version 1.0).

Ext4 is the latest version of ext3 which is the latest version of
ext2. Don't worry about it.

Use --force to over-ride the error. But ONLY in the non-main OSes. *DO
NOT DO THIS FOR ALL OF THEM!*

> Doing this still donsn't work. I can see where it says it detects
> Mint18.3 but it never shows up in the grub menu. My goal is to boot to
> Mint18.3 that is my main OS, the move to Mint19.3 was to be gradual as I
> moved stuff over to it.

Why not just upgrade 18.3 to 19.3?

Seems much easier. Then you can remove the separate 19.3 install.

Mint 20 will be coming soon... Each major release is based on the
then-current Ubuntu LTS. Mint 19.x is based on Ubuntu 18.04. Mint 20
will be based on Ubuntu 20.04 .

-- 
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053