Grubs made a meal of my multi-boot

[Maverick82]

I previously had mandriva working nicely with a dual boot with windows, however i wanted to triple boot when i installed gentoo. It chose GRUB as the default bootmanager and instaleld it. only problem is it only has gentoo as the current option, neither windows or mandriva is available. Looking at some helpful sites I tried editing the menu.lst file to the following (i added the lines for windows) but it still wont let me boot.

title Windows
root (hd0,5)
chainloader +1


My internet connection has also failed to install on the gentoo install so i am typing this from the boot from the liveCD. So i cant copy and paste the output of fdisk -l ,i have tried my best and lookedat the graphical output of the gentoo installer which says:

/hda1 - i think this is my C drive in windows
/hda2 - this is my partition for games and movies
/hda5 - looks like my mandriva install
/hda6 - should be my gentoo /boot partition
/hda7 - is my linux swap for mandriva
/hda8 - is my gentoo partition


these are all on one hardrive can someone please help me at least get windows/mandriva running so i can start putting things right?

[Cobra]

Boot off the live CD and chroot into the gentoo system and all of that good stuff. make sure you have /dev/hda6 mounted at /boot. Check to make sure the configuration of /boot/grub/menu.lst (or whatever the file is) matches that of /boot/boot/grub/menu.lst, /boot/boot/boot/grub/menu.lst and so on. Start configuring those that start to match. For some reason the links don't always work right on those. I've had the same experience. Also, set your Windows boot config to:

title Windows
root (hd0,5)
chainloader +1

You were having it boot Windows off the Mandriva partition. Also, swap is swap. You don't need 2 partitions for 2 different distros. One common one is fine.