Re: Grub question

[walt]

y_farkash wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> My problem in a nutshell is that whenever I boot the system I get to the
> command line grub. I can boot either my windows machine (hda1) or the Linux
> one (DreamLinux (DL) on hdb2) from the command line perfectly fine. However,
> I can't seem to get the menu working. If I remember correctly, I installed
> Grub on MBR when installing DL.
>
> My drives configuration is:
> /dev/hda1 - winXP (ntfs)
> /dev/hda2 - general storage (fat32)
> /dev/hdb1 - swap
> /dev/hdb2 - DL (ext3)
> /dev/hdb3 - general storage (Reiserfs)
> /dev/hdc1 - general storage (fat32)
>
>
>  From within DL (hdb2) I have /boot/grub existing with a menu.lst file.
> However(!) I also have a boot folder in the hda1 (WinXP) partition! It has
> stage1, stage2 and grub folder, which contains a menu.lst file as well! It
> seems this one is from older, I think I tried installing grub4dos for some
> reason)...

Legacy grub can't read ntfs partitions, so that menu.lst is left over from
grub4dos (which *can* read ntfs).  You may as well delete it.

The problem is that grub is looking in the wrong place for menu.lst.  If
grub is installed on the MBR of hda then it most likely is expecting menu.lst
to be found somewhere on hda instead of hdb.

There may be a way to install grub to look on a non-boot drive for menu.lst
but I don't know how to do it.

I think the easiest way would be to tell your bios to use hdb as the boot
drive, and make sure grub is installed to the mbr of hdb (it's probably on
hda now, so you may need to reinstall grub to hdb).

As a diagnostic move you can use the 'configfile' command from the grub
command line to tell grub where menu.lst is located.  That should confirm
that my guesses are correct before you start changing things.