[clue-tech] Multi-boot chainloading to another boot partition

[qqq1one at yahoo.com]

I have an install of Fedora Core 5 (including /boot partition) on a slave drive.  This install was
originally done with the drive configured as the master, but I now have another drive configured
as the master with FC7 installed on it.

Recently I needed to boot back into FC5, and I wanted to do it without swapping the slave back to
the master.  Since I have previously multi-booted into WinXP on a slave drive using the following
grub.conf entry:

  title Windows XP
          map (hd0) (hd1)
          map (hd1) (hd0)
          rootnoverify (hd1,0)
          chainloader +1

I figured I could just do the same with the FC5 disk in place of the WinXP disk.  I know that this
is not the normal way to multi-boot from one Linux to another, since you can have the kernel and
initrd entries for the slave installation located on the primary disk /boot partition, but I
didn't want to mix the old with the new, and indeed I couldn't even find the /boot partition on
the slave drive without making it the primary again.

However, when I tried the map-and-chainload trick above with my slave FC5 drive, I got the Stage2
error:
 
  13 : Invalid or unsupported executable format

and I haven't been able to figure out why chainloading to another Linux boot partition would be
different than chainloading to a Windows master boot record.  Can someone help me understand this?
 Thanks in advance.


       
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