Re: Two GRUB setup can boot one each of two installs, but not the other, why?

[Bill Marcum]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 08:27:50AM -0500, address@hidden wrote:
> 
> Hi, 
> 
> I have a very strange GRUB problem, that got me totally stumped.
> 
> My system has two disk drives, one of which with two Linux installs.
> MBR of each disk has been setup from one of the two Linux installs,  
> and both to allow booting either Linux:
> 
> IDE disk (MBR setup from IDE part2 (Ubuntu 8.04))
> Part1: Mint 7 (Ubuntu 9.04 based)
> Part2: Ubuntu 8.04
> 
> SATA disk (MBR setup from IDE part1 (Mint 7))
> Part1-5: swap and user-data partitions
> 
> Grub version of both Linux installs is 0.97.
> 
> I have following pair of stanzas for both of Linux installs in their 
> respective /boot/grub/menu.lst:
> 
> title           Linux Mint 7 Gloria KDE, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
> #root           (hd1,0)
> uuid            3403d691-06fd-4646-840c-8f936fd99ab9
> #kernel         /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=/dev/sdb1 ro quiet
> splash 
> kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic
> root=UUID=3403d691-06fd-4646-840c-8f936fd99ab9 ro quiet splash 
> initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
> 
> title           Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-24-generic (on /dev/sdb2)
> #root           (hd1,1)
> uuid            9c17f912-7f27-40c4-a8c2-141924762217
> kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-24-generic
> root=UUID=9c17f912-7f27-40c4-a8c2-141924762217 ro quiet splash 
> initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-24-generic
> 
> I stress again that pair of stanzas in question in both menu.lst files 
> are copies of each other. I have confirmed this by diffing them.
> 
Does each have its own /boot directory, or do you have a /boot partition?
If they are separate directories, I think each grub is looking for the
kernel and initrd.img files in its own /boot directory.
I notice that each stanza has "root hd(....)" commented out.