Triple Boot Hassles With Grub???

[PC eye]

Here's another fun moment apparently. When first going to install ubuntu 7.10 guess what went on the Vista primary? The Grub loader of course! (bangs head on wall!) A quick bootup into XP and quick run of the EasyBCD 1.7.1 then saw Vista restored while forget booting up with the installation disk for that.

Gee? XP and 7.10 after rebooting a few time both seemed to go together for a dual boot. The live installer recopied the XP boot files to the Vista primary since a reinstall of XP to isolate that version for debugging was now together again with Vista. The problem however is when going to reinstall ubuntu(partitioning, installing Grub not separate options) in order to see Grub installed on the ubuntu root partition where EasyBCD could easily add that in. No go!

Repeated attempts see the "Grub failed to install" message right at the end of the installation. The quesion now will be to stay with ubuntu if Grub can be installed from a terminal or simply replace ubuntu with Mandrake 2006 that will see all OSs instantly recognised and added into it's own boot loader as options but losing out on the benefits of the HnS tool?

 

[mqudsi]

When installing Ubuntu you need to be sure to change the installation target of GRUB as-is described on the Ubuntu page at Ubuntu - NeoSmart Technologies Wiki

Now when you are re-installing GRUB you need to specify a /dev/sd* location in the "Advanced" box.

 

[PC eye]

Once I found out too late where Grub was being installed I reinstalled over again to see Grub then installed to the root. But it was there after the installer reformatted and was installing Grub over again the failure message is seen. Grub is the last item to go on during the installation.

Grub was effectively removed from the Vista primary ruling anything lingering there. The live cd itself saw a good burn since Grub saw a working install the first time. The partitioning section has no problem finding the root since ubuntu was running from the drive earlier until seeing Vista back as the default.

The Vista drive is now seeing a second shared(intended) storage partition proceeding the root with the swap as the last on the default drive. The sda3 was simply chosen from the dropdown list and then editing the "/" mount entry to define that. Everything goes well even seeing the "installing Grub" message until the very end on repeat attempts.

I did find a thread on the ubuntu with instructions for seeing Grub installed from a terminal while booted live for seeing Grub installed I'll be trying out. That simply require five separate commands to see how that goes. But that also mentions hd0 rather than sda there.

 

[PC eye]

Grub was finally installed to the root with the (HD0,3) entry with a working option to load 7.10 seen in the Vista boot options. But as seen before when trying to run Mandriva with that distro's graphic boot loader automatically seeing both XP and Vista alike added in the "insert system disk" error with BootPart 2.60 made by .... comes up when selecting ubuntu.

The first install with Grub installed at the system root saw XP load up with that same error at first until after loading XP a few times. Suddenly ubuntu was running normally for an XP/ubuntu dual boot leaving Vista out of the equation altogether. With the EasyBCD configuration set the several restarts have seen no progress leaving that as the one remaining problem with no references for this error seen in the ubuntu community or how tos troubleshooting so far.

 

[mqudsi]

OK, if you had an Ubuntu dual-boot working w/ XP:

EasyBCD -> Bootloader Management -> Reinstall Vista Bootloader
EasyBCD -> Add/Remove Entries -> Linux and GRUB is not installed

Should do the trick.

 

[PC eye]

So you would check off the Grub is not installed in boot sector box? I wondered on that one since the HnS tool uses Grub4Dos.

Now there's a question for that as well. Can an entry to see the 7.10 release be added in there since that will load XP and Vista without even seeing any entries besides the Vista default setting and 0 boot time in the EasyBCD tool? That would save on stopping at a second boot options screen to see ubuntu loaded.

The vista mbr was restored and the box for not seeing Grub installed was checked off once seeing the new entry for ubuntu added in. When the option for ubuntu is selected the Grub4Dos screen is seen again since I set that to 10 seconds. When seeing Neogrub installed again the :"cannot load from hard drive; please insert system disk" error still points at something not being configured.

 

[PC eye]

Ubuntu 7.10 Now Default Os?

In a turn of events seeing Grub custom installed to the XP sata drive it finally recognised the "Vista loader" under "other operating systems" and proceeds to load the 7.10 release as the default OS while still seeing the Vista/XP dual boot run as well. In fact it now won't matter which of the two sata drives is set as the default boot device since both see Grub first then Grub4Dos care of HnS second.

The task now is to see Grub configured to set the Vista loader option as the default while still being able to load 7.10 as the option there. Apparently the reinstall attempts finally realized all files being fully copied to the drive from the live cd.