Grub Legacy Manual boot

[theKbStockpiler]

Is anyone's Grub able to manually Boot by



Pressing C at the Select O.S Prompt

root (hard-drive_name)

kernel /boot/kernel_name)

initrd /boot/init_name) And finally

boot 'enter'

None of my systems will do this and all of the guides state that this will work.Does this function work on modern Systems?

Thanks in advance!

[jayd512]

Using GRUB legacy, that could work...
But only if you entered the exact, correct information. No typos allowed.
You'll need to have a list of distros that are installed, and where they happen to be located. /boot partitions, as well, if applicable.
fdisk -l will help with this.

Is there a reason that you need to manually enter your boot options?

[devils casper]

As jayd512 mentioned already, there shouldn't be any typo at grub> prompt. Device name assigned to Hard disk, kernel name/version should be exact.
Post the output of this

ls /boot

root (hard-drive_name)
kernel /boot/kernel_name)
initrd /boot/init_name) And finally
boot 'enter'

Post exact commands.

[theKbStockpiler]

root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# mount -t ext3 /dev/sda2 /mnt
root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# cd /mnt
root@Microknoppix:/mnt# ls
bin dev initrd lost+found opt sbin tmp vmlinuz
boot etc initrd.img media proc srv usr
cdrom home lib mnt root sys var
root@Microknoppix:/mnt# ls /mnt/boot
System.map-2.6.22-14-generic initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic
abi-2.6.22-14-generic initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic.bak
config-2.6.22-14-generic memtest86+.bin
grub vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic
root@Microknoppix:/mnt#

The boot process stalls if initrd is used. If it is not used the kernel panics.

[devils casper]

How did you install Knoppix? Do you know that even Knoppix developers don't recommend its Hard disk installation?
Anyways, have you installed any other Linux distro in same Hard disk? Could you post the output of fdisk -l command here?

[theKbStockpiler]

kbs@kbs-laptop:~$ sudo fdisk -l
omitting empty partition (5)

Disk /dev/sda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xffffffff

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 2664 21398548+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 2665 4449 14336972 83 Linux
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3 4449 7100 21295104 83 Linux
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda4 7101 7296 1574370 5 Extended
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda5 7101 7168 546147 83 Linux
kbs@kbs-laptop:~$

The situation is that when I add a distro the new distro does not pickup the last one and the only success I have had is chainloading the distros that are not the last one installed. I can usually only get one distro to directly boot ,the last one installed. On this partitcular laptop grub made windows which was installed first unmountable and made its self unbootable. I know this is unheard of but I did this back to back with the same results.


I have MS on sda1 ,Ubuntu on sda2 and Fedora on sda3 . I tried to make a grub partition and have a one gig swap. I'm also trying to boot from a disk because don't want grub to damage windows again.

knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ su
root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# mount -t ext2 /dev/sda5 /mnt
root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# cd /mnt
root@Microknoppix:/mnt# ls
boot legacy lost+found
root@Microknoppix:/mnt# cd /boot
root@Microknoppix:/boot# ls
System.map-2.6.39.3 config-2.6.39.3 grub vmlinuz vmlinuz-2.6.39.3
root@Microknoppix:/boot#

Knoppix is live on this computer.

[yancek]

Which bootloader are you using? Fedora? Ubuntu?
Fedora is notorious for not detecting any other Linux systems.
I don't know how Grub could cause windows to be "unmountable" since it doesn't even try to mount windows partitions. What do you mean by Grub making itself unbootable? You're being pretty vague about all this.

[jayd512]

Have you looked at the GRUB Legacy documentation? Here is the section regarding Booting; GNU GRUB Manual 0.97
Post the output of cat /boot/grub/grub.conf.

[theKbStockpiler]

I had MS , Ubuntu and Fedora on this computer but Ubuntu was being chainloaded. I wanted Ubuntu to directly boot and just have one grub screen. The last thing I did was to reinstall grub to the MBR of this single drive system from Fedora so Fedora's stage2 would be used and have it directly boot Ubuntu. I did not think grub could go haywire but it did and made Windows unmountable so (bootcfg /rebuild would not obviously work because it could not be rescued from a rescue disk and Fedora will no longer boot. I reinstalled windows and then burned my own grub disk because all of my rescue/install disks are garbage and the tab completion feature will not usually work on these. The one I burned works every time as far as Tab-Completion goes. So I don't have grub in the MBR anymore and I'm relying on the boot disk for that. I did try a boot partition but abandoned it.

[devils casper]

As yancek mentioned already, installers of some distros (actually, all RedHat based distros like CentOS, Fedora, RHEL etc. ) do not detect other installed distros. One has to add an entry of other distro in GRUB Menu manually.

On this partitcular laptop grub made windows which was installed first unmountable and made its self unbootable. I know this is unheard of but I did this back to back with the same results.

It looks like GRUB detected Windows OS correctly but assigned wrong partition for it in GRUB conf. Post the contents of /boot/grub/grub.conf file here.

Your Hard disks partition structure doesn't look good. /dev/sda2 is overlapping sda3.

I wanted Ubuntu to directly boot and just have one grub screen.

In that case, you could have set hiddenmenu and 1 sec timeout for Ubuntu GRUB.

What is the situation now? You have fresh Windows OS installation which is not booting up by default. Fedora's GRUB is also not working and you are using boot disk to boot Fedora and Windows OS. Am I correct?
Which version of Fedora and Windows OS are you using?