Problem with Multiple Boot WinXP,RHEL6 and RHEL 5.5

[RobertHug]

I am a newbie with Linux and trying new things here..I have a problem that have been intriguing me for days..I have partitioned my 500 GB HD into different HDD and I formated a couple of them on NTFS and left others.I have installed Windows XP on one of the drives as I use it for work. I then installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta version on one of the other drives (free space) .All partitions are in EXT4 file system.I could boot both OS without problem ,As RHEL 6 is a beta one I wanted to Install RHEL5.5 which is stable and installed it in a third drive .I am now only able to boot the newly installed RHEL5.5 and Windows XP. How can I change the boot loader so that I can boot RHEL6 as well.

[yancek]

Your post indicates you have installed several operating systems and that you have one 500GB hard drive. You then refer to install RHLinux-6 and RHLinux-5.5 on separate drives?? Are you confusing drives with partitions? Do you have one physical 500GB hard drive with several partitions?

I expect the problem is that the RHLinux 5.5 installation did not detect the other (RH6) Linux operating system. You will just need to put an entry in the RedHat -5.5 /boot/grub/menu.lst file pointing to the correct partition.

Can't be any more specific as I don't know your hard drive layout. If you don't know how to put an entry in the menu.lst file, post back indicating which system you are booting from (xp, RH-5.5, or RH6) and from Red Hat, open a terminal as root and run the command: fdisk -l and post that partition information here. (that is a lower case Letter L in the fdisk command).

I don't use Red Hat but believe they still use grub legacy and not grub2. You might check that by typing "grub" as root and looking at the output.

[RobertHug]

Hi yancek,

Sorry for confusing drives with partitions. I have only one 500 gig drive .Below is the information I got from fdisk -l :
Disk /dev/sda: 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/sda1 * 1 9689 77826861 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 9690 60801 410557140 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 9690 22437 102398278+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6 22438 37748 122985576 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda7 50504 51026 4194304 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 51026 59017 64186368 83 Linux
/dev/sda9 59017 60148 9084928 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda10 60148 60540 3145728 6 FAT16
/dev/sda11 37749 37761 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda12 37762 50503 102350083+ 8e Linux LVM

Partition table entries are not in disk order
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am booting from RHEL5.5 and find below the contents of grub.conf

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0,10)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,10)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
password --md5 $1$usWdVKVd$zoN8AMWnGqtBVk09ih7ikg1
title Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (2.6.18-194.3.1.el5)
root (hd0,10)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.3.1.el5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet crashkernel=128M@16M
initrd /initrd-2.6.18-194.3.1.el5.img
title Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (2.6.18-194.el5)
root (hd0,10)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.el5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet crashkernel=128M@16M
initrd /initrd-2.6.18-194.el5.img
title RHEL6
rootnoverify (hd0,7)
chainloader +1
title Other
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[devils casper]

RHEL installer doesn't detect other installed Linux OSes. One has to edit GRUB Config for multiboot setup.

Chainloading doesn't work if you haven't installed GRUB in boot sector of / or /boot partition.

Boot up RHEL 5.5. Mount /dev/sda7 partition and open its /boot/grub/grub.conf file. Copy its first title block ( first title, root, kernel and initrd lines ) and paste in grub.conf file of RHEL 5.5.
Reboot machine.

[RobertHug]

I tried your way by mounting /dev/sda7 ,copying and pasting the title,root ,kernel and initrd lines in grub.conf. I copied related initrd and vmlinz and other related files into /boot partition. I am getting an error saying file or directory system error..I am not sure if the problem is because of difference of file system. The file system of partitions including boot in RHEL6 is EXT4 which is different on RHEL5.5.

[devils casper]

Which version of GRUB are you using in RHEL 5.5? Could you post the contents of grub.conf files of both OSes?

[RobertHug]

Hey, here is the contents of grub.conf

----RHEL5.5-------
# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0,10)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,10)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
password --md5 $1$usWdVKVd$zoN8AMWnGqtBVk09ih7ikg1
title Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (2.6.18-194.3.1.el5)
root (hd0,10)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.3.1.el5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet crashkernel=128M@16M
initrd /initrd-2.6.18-194.3.1.el5.img
title Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (2.6.18-194.el5)
root (hd0,10)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.el5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet crashkernel=128M@16M
initrd /initrd-2.6.18-194.el5.img
title Red Hat Enterprise Linux (2.6.32-19.el6.i686.debug)
root (hd0,7)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32-19.el6.i686.debug ro root=UUID=9d6074a9-3a8e-42fe-a785-f7cfb90770ed rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_LVM rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us nomodeset rhgb quiet crashkernel=auto
initrd /initramfs-2.6.32-19.el6.i686.debug.img
title Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (2.6.32-19.el6.i686)
root (hd0,7)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32-19.el6.i686 ro root=UUID=9d6074a9-3a8e-42fe-a785-f7cfb90770ed rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_LVM rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us nomodeset rhgb quiet
initrd /initramfs-2.6.32-19.el6.i686.img
title Other
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
-------------RHEL6.0----------------------

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0,7)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/sda9
# initrd /initrd-[generic-]version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=1
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,7)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Red Hat Enterprise Linux (2.6.32-19.el6.i686.debug)
root (hd0,7)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32-19.el6.i686.debug ro root=UUID=9d6074a9-3a8e-42fe-a785-f7cfb90770ed rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_LVM rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us nomodeset rhgb quiet crashkernel=auto
initrd /initramfs-2.6.32-19.el6.i686.debug.img
title Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (2.6.32-19.el6.i686)
root (hd0,7)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32-19.el6.i686 ro root=UUID=9d6074a9-3a8e-42fe-a785-f7cfb90770ed rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_LVM rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us nomodeset rhgb quiet
initrd /initramfs-2.6.32-19.el6.i686.img
title Other
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
----------------------------------

[RobertHug]

How to know the version of GRUB