Trouble booting

[Jim Cornette]

your best nightmare wrote:
> I installed Fedora 5 on my dual boot system. It has Windows and Ubuntu 
> linux 6.06, and the boot loader is GRUB. I have each Windows, Ubuntu, 
> and Fedora on seperate partitions. During the Fedora installation, I 
> initially marked that I would not want my boot menu to be changed, 
> thinking that Ubuntu would automatically change it. After Fedora was 
> installed, I found that it was not on the grub menu. So, I then booted 
> from the Fedora CD again, and selected the update option. When asked if 
> I would like to change the boot loader, I said yes. On the next screen, 
> Windows and Fedora were listed as operating systems, I added Ubuntu. 
> When I got to the screen where Fedora actually started making changes, 
> an error message popped up that said a kernel for Fedora was not found, 
> and the boot menu would not be changed.

If the kernel is newer than the kernel on your installation media, the 
installer does not update grub. I have seen this happen on one of my 
installs which the kernel installed was newer than the kernel on the 
installation medium. This also might happen if the kernel was the same 
version. I am not sure.

  After this, I got pretty
> frustrated, and tried manually changing the boot menu from inside 
> Ubuntu. None of the configurations worked, and I am still not able to 
> boot into Fedora. If anyone would be able to help it would be very much 
> appreciated.

I don't know if booting Fedora into rescue mode, chrooting into the 
installation, creating a mountpoint for the install media, mounting the 
install media and then changing to the directory where the rpms are 
located, then running
rpm -ivh --replacefiles --replacepkgs kernel*.<arch>.rpm would update 
grub and correct the kernel problem.

This still would leave you with getting ubuntu and Fedora to boot from 
the same grub menu. Basically, you either have to add the entry from one 
distros grub file into the grub which has the controlling grub or 
chainload the installations from the controlling grub installation and 
install the other grub installations into the desired partition.

> 
> 
> By the way, my Windows is on hda1, my Ubuntu is on hda2, and Fedora is 
> on hda4.

I assume that hda3 is swap and you have both installations configured to 
run as /, where /boot is seperate for each installation.

Others might have an easier way out.

Jim

-- 
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