Re: [sheflug] Multi distros?

[Peter Collier <pecb [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> On Sunday 26 March 2006 23:58, J Simpson V21 wrote:
>
> Hi Peter,
> Thanks for your reply.  Since installing Suse I am unable to access the
> Fedora.  When the machine boots up it gives me two options windows and
> Suse.  I presume I can't copy the Fedora's menu.lst until I can access
> it.  Is there another way to do this?
>
> I'm a bit lost here and fear I have used the wrong language (caused
> confusion).
> I understand that there are two programmes that boot up operating
> systems lilo and grub. With linux I have only used grub.
>
> With Fedora I only had to go in to change the default from windows to
> Fedora.  I assumed that the boot/grub/menu.lst was the information used
> by grub to boot the operating systems?  I don' t know really know what a
> chainloader is?  It is just listed in the file /boot/grub/menu.lst.  I
> did use Yast to add fedora, but it did not work.   I can provide the
> information for my /boot/groub/menu.lst if that would help?
>
> Regards
> Janet

We need to know where the /boot partition for fedora is on your hard disk. For 
this example we'll assume it's on /dev/hda4. (alter /dev/hda4 to whatever is 
correct in your case). 
This is the way I've done it and so far it has worked. Someone else may have a 
better method.
In suse, open a terminal, change to root. i.e. type in su -, it will prompt 
you for roots password. 
Type in mount /dev/hda4 /mnt (alter hda4 to whatever is correct)
Type in kate (text editor which I think is installed by default in suse)
Open the menu.lst file from fedora which should be in /mnt/boot/grub.
Find the lines that has the entry for booting fedora. (some thing like 
Title fedora 
There will be a couple of lines saying where the kernel and initrd is. 
Here is an example for my ubuntu entry.

title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.12-9-386 
    kernel (hd1,0)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-19-386 root=/dev/hdb1 ro quiet splash
    initrd (hd1,0)/boot/initrd.img-2.6.12-9-386
    boot

Copy the entry like above but in your case it will be referring to fedora not 
ubuntu.
Using kate, open the file menu.lst in your suse's /boot/grub and insert after 
the suse entry the lines copied as above.
It may be that fedora has an entry that says root (hd0,0) or /dev/hda1 before 
the entry for fedora. If it has, then copy that but paste it in your suse 
menu.lst after the line stating the fedora title but before the line that 
states kernel /boot/(whatever is in your case) otherwise it wn't boot.
Save the suse menu.lst file (it will do a backup of your original), close down 
and reboot. Hopefully it should work.
If you get tiied up in knots, if no-one disagrees, to save bandwidth/and reams 
of emails to this list, you can contact me directly and I'll walk you through 
it with better more accurate detail. I need to know where how your partions 
are set up.

Peter C

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