legacy grub missed partition

[Jan Stefan]

I am new to grub, Linux, and mail lists.

I did look in the Manual and mail list archive but found no solutions.

 

I have  2 identical x86 PCs. The first was set up by someone else who is no longer available and Grub works fine.

Menu.lst has 2 menu entries, one to boot a backup Linux in sda1 the other boots the production system in sda2.  

 

The stage 2  loader is in the first partition. I have an embedded ext2 stage 1.5 following the MBR.   

 

The second  system boots the backup partition but not the production system.

I can mount and use the second partition from the backup Linux.

The print command to the parted program shows the same information for partitions on both PCs.

 

Both partitions on the second system were made by the parted application as primary ext2 partitions.

mkfs.ext3 was used to turn them into ext3.

The data for each partition was untared from archived data.

 

On the second PC when I select the menu entry for the sda2 partition, I receive the message “bad file or directory type” from the kernel command.

If I corrupt the kernel name, I receive the same message, while I would have expected “file not found”.

 

The only other symptom I can see where PCs differ is that a find command that should find a file in both partitions finds them on the first PC but only reports (hd0,0) on the second PC.

 

The manual says find will work on all mountable partitions. My second partition is mountable but find does not seem to work.

 

I need to get grub to load from either partition on the second PC.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

 

TIA,

Jan