GRUB2 problem installing correctly

[kevinc]

I'm quite happy at having been able to get the latest alpha 2 of Karmic, checked the MD5sum, burned the CD and installed it. The only problem was writing to the MBR. It claimed that it didn't work, allowed me to continue, I tried again, tried typing (hd0) which is really the same thing, tried both of the options, GRUB2 and GRUB, neither worked. The only difference GRUB did not give the option to continue.

After about a dozen attempts, I exited without installing GRUB. The CD was ejected, the computer rebooted into Karmic, which I'm using now, so the error message wasn't quite correct.

One other minor problem, is that it correctly detected my dual boot Kubuntu Jaunty, but the boot menu only had Karmic. That is easily fixed by copying the relevant entries from the /boot/grub/menu.list of Jaunty to Karmic.

Edit: changed title from 'GRUB2 or GRUB' to 'GRUB2'

[kevinc]

Re: GRUB2 or GRUB problem installing correctly

The situation is slightly better, but not yet solved.

There were some grub updates, I can't remember all of the packages but installing the packages automatically did a fresh grub install on my MBR. As you know with a dual boot, the last one wins, so Karmic won over Jaunty. At least this time it recognized Jaunty and put it in the file list which for grub2 is grub.cfg not menu.lst
however, on reboot neither booting Karmic nor booting Jaunty nor safe mode or anything else worked.

Fortunately I had my Jaunty alternate CD handy, booted from that, selected rescue, mounted the Jaunty root partition, update-grub and grub-install, reboot, everything is back to normal.

Keep working on the grub2 for Karmic.

Edit: Another grub update for Karmic which overwrote my Jaunty written MBR, again, and, once again prevented me from booting into Jaunty. Jaunty alternate cd rescue mode had it fixed in a minute - running grub-install and rebooting.

I think the problem may be Karmic grub thinks /boot and /root must be the same partition and sets the UUID accordingly, which is wrong. I have / for Karmic on /dev/sda1, / for Jaunty on /dev/sda5, /boot for Karmic on /dev/sda7 and /boot for Jaunty on /dev/sda9. At least now grub on Karmic is finding Jaunty and even adding it to the /boot/grub/grub.cfg, but it puts the wrong UUID, so of course, it won't boot.

[kevinc]

Re: GRUB2 problem installing correctly

Another GRUB update and another failure.

So far three GRUB updates, and three times GRUB2 on Karmic has overwritten my Jaunty written MBR and messed it up so that I can't boot into Jaunty. This requires booting from a Jaunty CD in rescue mode, mounting root in Jaunty and grub-install so that I can boot into Karmic or Jaunty.

When I dual booted Ubuntu Jaunty and Kubuntu Jaunty, they correctly detected the other and wrote correct /boot/grub/menu.lst entries which allowed me to boot either.