New user - grub question

[costas100]

Hello to all at Mageia, my name is Costas Lazarou and presently I live in Canada. Just created an account in the Forum and I am now logged in. I do have a simple question below, which I hope can be answered before I proceed with my first installation of Mageia I am from Greece originally and a mixture of a few other Countries.

I have been using Ubuntu Linux for some years now (installed at least 10 different versions of Ubuntu and derivatives), mainly the Gmone versions and lately I tried Mint (based on Ubuntu)
I just wish to ask a basic question before installing my first Mageia distro in one of my computers. It will be a triple boot with one windows XP and two Ubuntu or Mint all in Gnome.
My basic question is if Mageia will manage to add to the existing grub the information required.
The most probable arrangement will be in a Lenovo computer which now has Ubuntu 10.04 and ubuntu 11.04 with XP pro in between. I plan to replace Ubuntu 10.04 with Mageia KDE version. Please let me know if I will face any serious problems with grub.

All the best to the Mageia team

Costas

[isadora]

Costas100, very welcome to the Mageia forum!!!!

First, i have moved your message to a topic for it's own.
This way it gets better attention, and better chances for answers.
And for the same reason altered your subject (title) of the message.

It would even had been better, having split your introduction and your question into two different topics.

[jkerr82508]

It will be a triple boot with one windows XP and two Ubuntu or Mint all in Gnome.

Which means that you are probably using Grub2, in which case you should read:
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_2_Err ... stribution
and
http://docteam.mageia.nl/installer/cont ... xpert.html

Jim

[laidlaws]

I wanted to pop this in somewhere useful.

I just managed to configure my Mageia Grub1 to take a Grub2 system following the instructions at http://docteam.mageia.nl/installer/cont ... xpert.html .

I already had a Mageia bootloader, and installed Calculate 12 (a Gentoo derivative) alongside it. Calculate 11 apparently used Grub 1, and I had a stanza in my existing Mageia booloader for that. For Grub 2, I merely replaced the Grub 1 chainload command (the last line of the stanza) with

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kernel /boot/grub/core.img

straight from the HOWTO. It worked first time. Jim would need a separate stanza for each Gnome system.

[tim]

Hello Costas,

I have currently 3 hard drives, 2 of them formatted with ntfs and the third one is my mageia drive. You just have to install the grub loader to the partition containing your Linux system, then it recognizes your windows installation (i have win7 32bit). Afterwards you have to edit your BIOS settings: the hard drive with linux installed has to be the one you boot first so grub starts automatically and not your windows system. With grub you can choose then which system to boot. And if you ever want to automatically boot Win again, just change your BIOS settings. Thats the easiest way I figured out in my several years of trial and error

tim

sorry for the spelling mistakes

[doktor5000]

Costas, I am also very new (to Mageia) but welcome.
The previous posts were helpful and would be the 'recommended' procedure but if you are still uncertain and unsure, the easiest option (at first) would be to chainload. It works either way, ie., from a grub 0.97 boot to grub2 OS or from grub2 boot to grub 0.97 OS.

Chainloading from grub 0.97 boot is as follows....

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title Ubuntu (grub 2)
root (hd0,x)
chainloader +1

Chainloading from grub2 is as follows

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menuentry "Mageia - Chainloader " {
    insmod part_msdos
    insmod ext2
    search --no-floppy --label --set=root xxx
    chainloader +1
}

you can use the following search lines instead...

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search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

And not so good (if you have more than 1 drive)

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set root=(hd0,x)

Always note that for a partition /dev/sdax
in grub 0.97 it is (hd0,(x-1))
in grub2 it is (hd0,x)

That is, sda3 will be (hd0,2) in grub 0.97 and (hd0,3) in grub2.

If you want to boot directly (without chainload) these are the entries.....

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menuentry 'Magea (grub-legacy)' {
   insmod part_msdos
   insmod ext2
   search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
   linux /boot/vmlinuz root=UUID=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx nokmsboot ro
   initrd /boot/initrd.img
}

title Ubuntu (grub 2)
kernel (hd0,x)/boot/grub/core.img


Good luck.

ps; if you want to convert your Mageia to grub2, there is an easier way from your Ubuntu OS
mount your Mageia partition to say, /media/Mageia

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sudo grub-install --boot-directory=/media/Mageia/boot /dev/sda

{watch out for spaces!}
or if to its own partition,

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sudo grub-install -f --boot-directory=/media/Mageia/boot /dev/sdax

[doktor5000]

@gohlip: Please use code-tags next time: ftp://ftp.mandrivauser.de/rpm/rpm/extra ... e_tags.ogv

[gohlip]

@gohlip: Please use code-tags next time

Okay, got it.

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  Me not so much a forum guy. More comfortable with  mailing lists .

Cheers.