[Techtalk] Installing XP without affectin Linux

[David Sumbler]

On Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:55 +1000, "Miriam English" <mim at miriam-
english.org> wrote:
> My guess is that grub is looking in the wrong place for the boot menu.
> It should be in the /boot folder of the Linux bootable partition. But
> which drive and partition is that?

grub is in /boot which is on the root partition of my Ubuntu system,
i.e. /dev/hda7.

grub-install seems to be finding menu-lst and stage1 OK, judging from
other messages that have been generated.

Googling for the error message I am getting (about stage1 being read
incorrectly) I find a lot of references, but none of the suggestions I
have tried have worked for me.

> Of course if the system uses the new naming scheme for drives then the
> SATA drive looks like it is first in the system, but grub still sees
> the old order. Confusing? Yes. They didn't think this through
> properly. But you can work it out if you sit down and note it down
> carefully on a separate machine or paper (so you have it to refer to
> while you fix the computer).

My setup is actually very simple.  Windows is on /dev/hda1, Ubuntu
8.04 on /dev/hda7.  I have /home on another partition, and still
  other partitions are used for other purposes, but none of them
  needs to be bootable.

When Ubuntu is up and running, it sees the relevant partitions as
/dev/sda1 and /dev/sda7, if I remember correctly.  menu.lst, though, has
them as hd0,0 and hd0,6 (or whatever the exact format is - I can't
access the file at the moment because I am running Windows!).  This is
how it has been for a long time.  It has never caused any problems when
an updated kernel is installed and grub is automatically rerun.

I am wondering whether there is a way to get Ubuntu to boot normally
once I have chroot-ed to /dev/hda7, so that everything is set up as it
used to be after booting Ubuntu, and presumably grub-install would then
work normally.  I need it to boot from the point after the MBR has done
its bit.  Is this possible?

-- 

David Sumbler

david at aeolia.co.uk