Tri-Booting - HELP!!

[pieman93]

I wish to tri-boot my laptop.
I have three partitions, Vista was installed first, then XP, and now Mandriva.
It will boot into Mandriva but not recognize Vista or XP even though they are still on their partitions.
How can I make a boot menu that shows XP, Vista, and Mandriva Linux?

Please email me your responces in addition to posting here...
fredrickson93@gmail.com

Thank you,
John

[jayd512]

Hello and Welcome!

You'll probably have to edit the GRUB menu. Execute

fdisk -l

to find out where your different partitions are located, then

su -
pico /boot/grub/menu.lst

to edit the boot list.

[pieman93]

I am totally new to Linux. Today was my first time ever using it and I think I am getting wayy to ahead of myself...

How do I get to the GRUB menu?

[pieman93]

I'm getting the following when I try to boot into Linux now... I think I did something bad while trying to get Vista to load...

{....}
*** An error occurred during the file system check.
*** Dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot
*** When you leave the shell.
Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D to continue)
*I type in the password*
chomd: changing permissions of '/root/tmp' : Read-only file system
(Repair filesystem) 1#

now I have NO idea what to do...

[jayd512]

Okay... do you have the install CD for Mandriva? If so, there should be a Rescue option to boot into. Boot into that, execute

fdisk -l                  That's a small L, not a 1

Post the output here.

[pieman93]

Usually I'm really good with this kind of stuff...
I can't find a Rescue option or mode anywhere...
:[

[jayd512]

What about any type of LiveCD? Do you have access to one?

[pieman93]

I am not sure...
I have an a burned copy of Mandriva Spring 2008...

On the desktop when I booted it from the CD there was "Live install" which is how I got it installed as an OS on the partition...

[jayd512]

Does it launch straight into the installation? If so, try to burn a copy of another LiveCD like Knoppix. With that, we should be able to get your system back in working order.

[pieman93]

Well when Live Install opened I had to do a bunch of weird partition stuff...
What I think I will do to make it all simpler for myself is,
1. Boot Mandriva from the disk
2. Back up all my partitions
3. Reformat all my partitions
4. Completely start over...

This way I can get a clean install of everything and I'll just follow some instructions on doing the tri-boot from clean installs that I found...

(am I making sense?)

I have both Mandriva and Ubuntu...Which would people recommend because Mandriva was kind of laggy...