[clue-tech] Debian squeeze

[Collins Richey]

On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 11:09 AM, David L. Anselmi <anselmi at anselmi.us> wrote:
> Collins Richey wrote:
>> And, of course, as mentioned earlier, I can't believe that no one at
>> Debian actually tested the ability to boot additional distros from
>> their grub2 setup. If a distro doesn't play well in the playground
>> with others, I just cross it off my list.
>
> Probably they did and it worked for them.  They might get lucky though and fix your problem even
> though they don't know it exists.

I'm sure there aren't that many users with multi-boot setups, so it
probably didn't get much attention.

I always report problems where I have some skin in the game. In this
case I wasn't interested in preserving the environment (two many
pieces to be juggled to get to what I want from the system) - just
wanted to get back to a usable system.

>
> The boot loader is tricky because each distro has to put it in the same place.  They can't skip it
> and they can't count on not being overwritten by another.  So it's no surprise there's some
> do-it-yourself work.  It would have been interesting to see your setup to understand what the issue is.

The setup was fairly simple two disks /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. sda is
windows vista. I don't know why I keep it. I didn't check to see if it
booted.

sdb has sdb1 (ext3 common partition), sdb2 swap, sdb3 extended, sdb5
was squeeze (ext4), sdb6 (present but unused), sdb7 pclinuxos (ext4).

All the grub2 stanzas boot by UUID. The stanza for squeeze looked
quite similar to that for pclinuxos, but one worked and the other
didn't.. I'll try this again some other time when I have more
patience.

>
> Perhaps there should be a standard that says each disk's MBR has a loader that just gives you a list
> of partitions and chain loads each one.  T

Not a bad idea.


-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.