Managing multi grub installs

[Rustom Mody]

Hi

My earlier thread
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-grub/2011-01/msg00017.html

Thanks to help from Jordan Ugla there, in particular, the suggestion
to use 'configfile',  things have been mostly working for the last 2-3
years. Recently it stopped working so this mail. More details below.

My blkid excerpts

/dev/sda2: LABEL="Boot500G" UUID="..." TYPE="ext2"
/dev/sda5: LABEL="Debian500G" UUID="..." TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda6: LABEL="Ubuntu500G" UUID="...." TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda7: LABEL="DebOld" UUID="..." TYPE="ext4"

In short I have multiple linuxes with their own /boots in sda5,6,7
And a /boot standalone in sda2.
The mbr points to sda2.
sda2 is not mounted in any OS so it does not get meddled with on upgrades

It contains entries written by hand like
menuentry "Debian  configfile chaining" {
        search --set --label Debian500G
        configfile /boot/grub/grub.cfg
}

And this was working for about a year.

IOW: the respective OSes would only upgrade their own boots under
their respective filesystems.  They would not stomp on each others'
toes and my handwritten boot would configfile-chain to them.

Then (small nuisance!) after upgrading the debian started introducing a
load_video function that would error out when chained with configfile.

No issue: I'd just delete that line after an upgrade and things kept
running smoothly.

But after my most recent debian-testing upgrade it just stopped working:
the second configfile just does not reach and the machine keeps rebooting.

As a current hack Ive made a new entry that works
menuentry "Debian 500 handedited" {
        linux (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz-3.12-1-686-pae root=LABEL=Debian500G ro
        initrd (hd0,5)/boot/initrd.img-3.12-1-686-pae
}

How do I keep configfile working??

Thanks
Rusi


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