[Techtalk] Dual Booting Red Hat and Mandrake

[Conor Daly]

On Fri, Nov 22, 2002 at 05:44:24PM -0800 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Arashi thought:
> Last night I installed Red Hat on my computer, which already has
> Mandrake. Mandrake is on /dev/hda1 and RH is on /dev/hda6. I'm using
> GRUB as the boot loader and Red Hat was selected as the default OS. 
> It works fine but if I select Mandrake from the the boot menu, I get
> this error message:
> 
> booting Mandrake...
> 
> rootverify (hd 0,0)
> chainloader +1
> Error 13: Invalid or unsupported exec format
> Press any key to continue 
> 
> Can anyone explain how this error occurs, eg: why does it complain
> about the exec format?   I've tried googling on this topic but most
> advice assumes the user is trying to dual boot windows and linux.
> Also, if I use the Mandrake boot disk, it displays the message:
> kernel panic: init not found, try passing init = to the kernel."  I
> read somewhere this happens because of changes in the order the
> drives are detected.  If this is the case, how can I fix it?
> 
> Many thanks
> Berenice

AIUI, chainloader is for dos partitions (or at least not for linux ones).
You need something much the same as the Redhat sequence in your grub.conf.

title Red Hat Linux (2.4.7-10)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.7-10 ro root=/dev/hda1 mem=127M vga=0xf07
        initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.7-10.img
        uppermem 130048
title Red Hat Genesis (2.4.7-10)
        root (hd1,1)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.7-10 ro root=/dev/hdb2 mem=127M vga=0xf07
        initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.7-10.img
        uppermem 130048

in this example, I have RH on each of /dev/hda1 and /dev/hdb2.  For your
MDK, you need something like:

title Mandrake
	root (hd0,0)
	kernel /boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda1
	initrd <if you need to specify>

Conor 
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
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