Mageia forum

I'm a multi-booter, have been for a long time. I've been booting 4 different Linux distros on my laptop for years.But Back when I started doing that, giving each Linux distro 16 gig of space seemed like plenty. Lately though I've sometimes found it a snug fit.

So since I've learned to like Mageia better than Sabayon anyway, and since the last time I upgraded my laptop's Sabayon installation, it borked itself, I decided to divide it's 16 gig between my music, & the other 3 Linux partitions.

Accordingly I dusted off my live gparted disk, And pushed things around... And it all worked. Except, that is, for my backup boot method...

I normally boot via explicit entries in my manually edited grub {legacy} partition, where I even maintain copies of the current vmlinuz & initrd files for each of the installed Linux.

But every now and then, I'm so tired after an upgrade that included a new kernel or initrd, that I fail to update my grub partition before rebooting. And/or it has happened that a simple typo in my menu.lst may result in an broken boot entry. So I very much like the fact that my menu.lst also has a section devoted to chainloader entries for each Linux partition. And since I always tell the installer to put it's automatically configured bootloader on the superblock of it's own "root" partition, that loader can be chainloaded.

Well in the process of growing my remaining Linux partitions to 20 gig, gparted had to "move" the starting point of two of them. And that broke the chain loader boot method for both my Mageia, and my antiX partitions.

This was expected. But I thought that since I can still use the manually edited boot entries in my grub partition, And since neither has grub2 installed, I expected to use the grub shell to fix it.

I can use grub's find command on unique filenames to verify their grub legacy partition names { for example: (hd0,10) } BUT...

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grub> find /boot/vmlinuz-3.8.13.4-desktop-1.mga3
find /boot/vmlinuz-3.8.13.4-desktop-1.mga3
 (hd0,10)
grub> root (hd0,10)
root (hd0,10)
 Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
grub> setup
setup

Error 11: Unrecognized device string
grub>


My question is, how does one setup a grub legacy installation to use the "root" partition without reinstalling just to get the installer to do it???

Hmmm, don't use setup directly from the shell, but instead boot into the OS via grub shell and then try to install?
Or you may want to try setup (hd0,10)

Also check http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual ... html#setup

doktor5000 wrote:Hmmm, don't use setup directly from the shell, but instead boot into the OS via grub shell and then try to install?

Not sure what difference that would have made... But:

Or you may want to try setup (hd0,10)

That advice was right on target! Thanks!

Also check http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual ... html#setup

And that link told me why I had it wrong... It said:

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setup [--force-lba] [--stage2=os_stage2_file] [--prefix=dir] install_device [image_device]


Which isn't explained in "man grub"... I might have found it, if I liked
wading through "info nodes", but I thought I could just use the grub shell's
"help" command to refresh my memory. But since they opted to use a two column
output for that, the equivalent line was truncated at:

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setup [--prefix=DIR] [--stage2=STAGE2_


If my brain hadn't tried to shut down while I was waiting for gparted to
resize all them partitions, I might have figured it out for myself. {sigh}

Thanks again