grub sees 2 out of 3 systems...lucky me

[Robert Holtzman]

On Tue, 27 Apr 2010, Karl Larsen wrote:

> On 04/26/2010 06:43 PM, Robert Holtzman wrote:
>> On Fri, 23 Apr 2010, Lucio M Nicolosi wrote:
>>
>>            .............snip...............
>>
>>> I guess the first thing to do is check whether the HD definitions are
>>> correct (since the uuids do not easily change)
>>>
>>> Boot your system with GParted live CD and check the right parameters
>>> (hdx,x) for each partition, Lenny, Jaunty, Hardy and Karmic. You already
>>> know for sure (from your menu.lst) the correct id of your working
>>> partition. Perhaps it would be a nice time to label each partition with
>>> proper nickname.
>>>
>>> Then, enter the system that is still accessible and run:
>>>
>>>     ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/
>>>
>> I don't think it has to be done from a live CD. I did it successfully from
>> a mounted 8.04 system. I learned this command some time ago but forgot
>> it in the interim.
>>
>>
>>> to get every UUID of your partitions. Since this command also gives you
>>> the number of the partition (sda1, sda3, etc) the first step is not
>>> really needed but you have to remember that in Grub1 (hd0,0) is in fact
>>> sda1, like in the example above where (hd0,8) was sda9. Grub2 changed
>>> this.
>>>
>>> Then you'll have to mount every single partition that contains a Linux
>>> version to get every kernel version you may find at
>>> media/[partition]/boot. Or you can check each /boot/grub/menu.lst and
>>> extract the commands lines for each kernel (like I roughly did above)
>>>
>>> With these informations you are now prepared to edit your menu.list in
>>> your working system, so that it addresses each kernel found in you
>>> computer with the proper HD Identification and UUID.
>>>
>>> Remember that in a computer with several system partitions the menu.lst
>>> has to be manually updated every time a (secondary) system has a kernel
>>> upgrade.
>>>
>>> I believe that by properly editing your menu.lst there's no way your
>>> systems can keep ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/"hiding themselves".
>>>
>>> But I'm not sure.
>>>
>> Me either. Running ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/ indeed gave me all the
>> partition UUIDs and since I knew what partitions 9.04 resides on and what
>> those partitions are, I could tell that the stanza I entered in the 8.04
>> menu.lst belonged to the 9.04 / partition. Just for the Hell of it I
>> changed the UUID to that of the /boot partition (on my systems I put
>> /boot on it's own partition). Same problem. "File not found".
>>
>> Also the stanzas were copied from my backup made when 9.04 would
>> successfully boot so I'm confident they are correct.
>>
>> Did I miss anything?
>>
>> Anyone else? Please.
>>
>>
>         I assume the latest version you loaded is 9.10. Is this
> correct?  If correct I think your active grub should be from this 9.10
> version.

I pulled 9.10 off and reinstalled 9.04. Because It didn't find 8.04, 
instead of screwing around with the menu.lst on 9.04, I reinstalled 8.04 
to it's old partitions and kept 9.04. Now 8.04s grub doesn't see 9.04. 
What fun!

>  Did you select Grub 1 or Grub2? If you don't know look at the
> /boot/grub/ directory of 9.10 and see if it has a few files and
> menu.lst, or, a whole lot of files one of which is grub.cfg.
>

I'm familiar with that.

-- 
Bob Holtzman
Key ID: 8D549279
"If you think you're getting free lunch,
  check the price of the beer"