booting suse and fedora on one HD

Hello. Its been along time since Ive been on the forums and needed help but Ive come to a halt and cant figure this out. I usally play with it over and over again untill i figure it out but im on my 6th reinstalled copy of suse because of the prior messups ive done trying to get this to work so Ive decided to ask the experts :)

Heres the Problem

I have Suse installed on a external 500 Gig Harddrive on a 120 gig partition. Everything is running fine no errors. I have installed fedora core 5 on another 120 gig partition on the same 500 gig hard drive and i selected to not install any boot loader for fedora. I want to use GRUB (from suse) to also have fedora in the list. Since installing fedora i havnt been able to access it. I know I can do this in the boot/grub/menu.lst doc but im not sure what to add so that i can boot to fedora. Ive tried a couple things but nothing works. Any help will be very appreciated. Thanks

boot up SuSe and mount Fedora's / (root) ( or boot, if you have created ) partition. note down exact filename of vmliuz and initrd files in /boot folder/partition of Fedora.

open /boot/grub/menu.lst file of SuSe and add this code

Code:

title Fedora Core 5 root (hdx,y) kernel /boot/<vmlinuz_filename> root=<Fedora's root partiton> ro quiet rhgb initrd /boot/<initrd_filename>

replace x, y with correct disk number and root partition number.
save file and reboot.

Quote:

Originally Posted by devils_casper

boot up SuSe and mount Fedora's / (root) ( or boot, if you have created ) partition. note down exact filename of vmliuz and initrd files in /boot folder/partition of Fedora.

open /boot/grub/menu.lst file of SuSe and add this code

Code:

title Fedora Core 5 root (hdx,y) kernel /boot/<vmlinuz_filename> root=<Fedora's root partiton> ro quiet rhgb initrd /boot/<initrd_filename>

replace x, y with correct disk number and root partition number.
save file and reboot.

Ok this got me a little further but couple more errors.

here is what my boot line for fedora is.

root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-1..2054_FC5smp ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp.img

it acts like its booting up then hardlocks. This is what it says

Booting command-list

root (hd0,4)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partitoin type 0x83
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-1..2054_FC5smp ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
[linux-bzImage, setup=0x1e00, size=0x17c0ac]
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp.img
[Linux-initrd @ 0x1fef6000, 0xf98d2 bytes]

Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel.
PCI: BIOS BUG #81[00000000] found
Red Hat nash version 5.0.32 starting
Unable to access resume device (/dev/sdb1)
mount: could not find filesystem '/dev/root'
setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory
switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

Im not sure if this makes a differnece but when installing fedora and selecting partitions I didnt use any volume groups or anything. I just set a ext3 mounting / to 20 gigs a swap to 1920 and a /home to 100 gigs. should i have kept the volume grouping?

post the contents of Fedora's /etc/fstab file and output of 'fdisk -l' command.

Quote:

Originally Posted by devils_casper

post the contents of Fedora's /etc/fstab file and output of 'fdisk -l' command.

ok fstab=

Code:

LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1 devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2 proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0 /dev/sdb1 swap swap defaults 0 0 LABEL=SWAP-sdb7 swap swap defaults 0 0

and fdisk -l =

Code:

linux-1y50:~ # fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 8367 67207896 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 8368 9598 9887976 c W95 FAT32 (LBA) /dev/sda3 9599 9729 1052226 d7 Unknown Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 1 262 2104483+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sdb2 * 263 2873 20972857+ 83 Linux /dev/sdb3 2874 15298 99803812+ 83 Linux /dev/sdb4 15299 60801 365502847+ 5 Extended /dev/sdb5 15299 17848 20482843+ 83 Linux /dev/sdb6 17849 30596 102398278+ 83 Linux /dev/sdb7 30597 30841 1967931 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Thanks for all your help man.

according to output of fdisk -l, root line should be root(hd1,4).

Code:

title Fedora Core 5 root (hd1,4) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-1..2054_FC5smp ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp.img

in case it doesn't work, boot up SuSe and post the output of 'df -h' command here.

Quote:

Originally Posted by devils_casper

according to output of fdisk -l, root line should be root(hd1,4).

Code:

title Fedora Core 5 root (hd1,4) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-1..2054_FC5smp ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp.img

in case it doesn't work, boot up SuSe and post the output of 'df -h' command here.

yeh it seems it should be disk 1 but for some reason i have to flip all of them around.
I used this post to figure that out just to boot to SUSE.

Installing SuSE on External USB Drive - openSUSE

I switched it around just to be sure and it says.

Code:

root (hd1,4) Error 22: no such partition

here is the code for df -h

Code:

linux-1y50:~ # df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb2 21G 8.6G 12G 43% / udev 474M 144K 474M 1% /dev /dev/sdb3 96G 33M 96G 1% /home /dev/sda1 65G 12G 53G 18% /windows/C /dev/sda2 9.5G 8.1G 1.4G 86% /windows/D /dev/sdb5 19G 5.1G 13G 29% /media/usbdisk

Fedora uses Labels instead of Partition numbers. during installation, Fedora's installer detected External as Secondary disk and Labeled partitions according to that only.
When you select External disk as First boot device in BIOS, it becomes Primary and Internal Disk becomes secondary. GRUB fails to find Labeled partition in Secondary disk.

mount Fedora Partition in SuSe and edit /etc/fstab file

Code:

/dev/sda5 / ext3 defaults 1 1 devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 /dev/sda6 /home ext3 defaults 1 2 proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0 /dev/sdb1 swap swap defaults 0 0

delete last SWAP line.

edit menu.lst file of SuSe.

Code:

title Fedora Core 5 root (hd0,4) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp ro root=/dev/sda5 rhgb quiet initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp.img

save files and reboot.

Quote:

Originally Posted by devils_casper

Fedora uses Labels instead of Partition numbers. during installation, Fedora's installer detected External as Secondary disk and Labeled partitions according to that only.
When you select External disk as First boot device in BIOS, it becomes Primary and Internal Disk becomes secondary. GRUB fails to find Labeled partition in Secondary disk.

mount Fedora Partition in SuSe and edit /etc/fstab file

Code:

/dev/sda5 / ext3 defaults 1 1 devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 /dev/sda6 /home ext3 defaults 1 2 proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0 /dev/sdb1 swap swap defaults 0 0

delete last SWAP line.

edit menu.lst file of SuSe.

Code:

title Fedora Core 5 root (hd0,4) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp ro root=/dev/sda5 rhgb quiet initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp.img

save files and reboot.

Ok tried it and got the same error.. If it is easier to reinstall fedora first then install SUSE I can do that.. Whatever is easier.

This is what i have.

Code:

/dev/sda5 / ext3 defaults 1 1 devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 /dev/sda6 /home ext3 defaults 1 2 proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0 /dev/sdb1 swap swap defaults 0 0

Code:

title Fedora Core 5 root (hd0,4) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp ro root=/dev/sda5 rhgb quiet initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp.img

Should they be sda or sdb on the changes you hade me make?

My mistake. we didn't edit swap partition name in /etc/fstab file of Fedora. edit /etc/fstab file of Fedora again.

Code:

/dev/sda1 swap swap defaults 0 0

Quote:

Should they be sda or sdb on the changes you hade me make?

No. post the contents of /boot/grub/device.map file of Fedora.