Re: Grub did not install on dual boot machine.

linuxquestion_at_yahoo.com
Date: 01/25/04 

Date: 24 Jan 2004 19:06:50 -0800

Well, after MUCH struggle, and MANY hours, I have
finally discovered the secret, and got grub to work.

When I first installed Suse, I used lilo, and it
worked fine. So, today I thought that I would try
installing Suse once again. Only this time, I used grub.
Suse installed fine, and gave me a nice dual boot.

But before installing Suse, I did notice with fdisk
that the /boot and / partitions were FAT16!

   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 1 1959 15735636 c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hdb2 * 1960 14593 101482605 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hdb5 1960 1972 104391 6 FAT16
/dev/hdb6 1973 2625 5245191 6 FAT16

Why? This made no sense. When I installed, I
instructed Redhat to format the partitions as ext3.
But they always showed up again as an unknown file type.

Call me demanding, but I do expect that when I give the
format command, and when it does proceed to format, that
the partitions would in fact get formatted as ext3. But it
must be too much to ask of the Redhat installer. I guess
it's just there for a warm fuzzy feeling inside, so
you can watch the taskbars slowly move across the screen
as you waste your time.

Originally, I had created the partitions with Windows
Diskpart. It was very easy to use, and I knew that I
wouldn't be destroying my Windows partitions with it.
During the Redhat install, I would then assign the
filesystem (/boot, etc.) Why the first two stayed as
FAT16, and failed to format, but not the others, is
beyond me.

After Suse's installation worked, I then tried installing
Redhat. This time I noticed that the partitions were
actually linux partitions. The installation worked, grub
got installed, and it worked. Ta Da!

So, I would say that there is a problem with the
Redhad Advanced Server installer. It doesn't format
the partitions the way it says it does. Suse's
installer worked fine, but Redhat's did not. Go figure.

I must say, that Suse's Yast2 install is so much
better than Redhat's. It formatted the partitions
right. It had a nice GUI for configuring the partitions
too. It gave a really good tool for configuring
the boot loader, even allowing me to see the grub.conf
file before proceeding. And it had all three grub
commands required for grub to boot Windows on Dell.
It took me a day to figure how to boot Windows with
Redhat grub, which only inserted two lines in grub.conf.

Suse probed my machine and found so much more that
Redhat did. It configured the sound, ethernet, DHCP,
printer, and the video card automatically. I could
even test the graphic configuration before proceeding.
When I rebooted, X windows came up cleanly.

With Redhat, it took another number of days to figure
out that the video, and ethernet were not even installed,
and more hours to fix it.

Too bad that Suse can't set some other fundamental
things: the modem, memory and shmmax. It might make
a good server.

I started this fiasco on Jan. 16th, and it is now
Jan. 24th. About 40 hours or more of my time wasted.
Thanks for nothing Redhat.

------------

linuxquestion@yahoo.com wrote in message news:<672ceaed.0401160739.69906325@posting.google.com>...
> Dear experts,
>
> On another Dell machine, I installed Redhat Advanced
> Server 2.1 last night. Twice, actually.
>
> There are two hard drives. XP is on the first
> hard drive, and also has the first partition for
> backup on the second drive.
>
> Linux is installed on the subsequent partitions
> on the second disk.
>
> Everything seemed to go well, except that,
> grub did not install. But the boot floppy worked.
> grub.conf seems to be fine. So it seems that there
> is something wrong with the MBR.
>
> I want grub to come up upon booting and give me
> the choice of Linux, or Windows, just like on my
> other dual boot machine. This uses the MBR.
>
> I'm sure that the solution is to use grub-install.
> Will others concur with this? What is the exact
> syntax that I should use?
>
> Thanks a lot

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