On Mon, 18 Sep 2023 12:26:22 -0500 Bill Barry <waba...@gmail.com> dijo:
>> I've been reading up on how to get this to work and I haven't found >> the answer yet. Both drives have a separate partitions for / and >> /home, and each of them has a /boot/grub/grub.cfg file in the / >> partition. At the top of the menu entries, the one in the Debian >> drive has Debian and Debian-Alternative followed by 80 (believe it >> or not) menu entries for Xubuntu. On the Xubuntu drive the file has >> menu entries only for Xubuntu, although only about 20 of them. >> Methinks some serious tidying up is overdue, but that can wait. >> Maybe a command to update grub is the right way to do it. >I had a similar problem after I did an update yesterday. Only one of >my systems was bootable. It turned out there was a line in the file >/etc/default/grub like this >GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false >which was commented out with a # in front of it. >Uncommenting it then running update-grub fixed the problem. I had already done that in both the grub.cfg files, but no luck. However, I finally kludged together something that got me booted into the Debian OS, and as you can see, I can reboot into Xubuntu. I had noticed that the grub.cfg file in the Debian installation had two menu entries at the top, which were missing in the Xubuntu file. I had been spending all my efforts trying to get the BIOS to find the Debian grub.cfg file, but I finally decided 'fine, if all it can find is the Xubuntu file, the all I need to do is add the Debian menu entries to the top of the Xubuntu file.' It took some finagling because of dealing with two files owned by root, but eventually I got the whole two menu entries from the Debian file pasted into the top of the Xubuntu menu entries. As I rebooted I was telling myself 'there is no way this is going to work, surely the computer won't boot to anything.' I had made a copy of the Xubuntu file, and I had visions of having to find a Knoppix disk or something to use so I could put the copy back, but guess what! It booted straight into Debian 12! Just before it booted I saw what looked like a Grub menu flash by in the upper left corner of my screen. It was gone way too fast to read, but it looked like there were eight lines in tiny text, text that happens on a 4K screen before it gets to a GUI. From past experience each distro in the menu probably had a main line, then a recovery line, followed by a couple lines for memtest. After I shut down Debian to come back here I remembered that hitting Esc after the BIOS gets you the Grub menu, so that's what I did to get back here. I never did get the BIOS to boot to the Grub folder in the new Debian drive. But at least it's working, and all I need to do is figure out how to get the Grub menu into a readable font, and make it come up always, without having to remember to hit Esc. Being a Linux user for years has accustomed me to using fudges and pokes to get things to work. Today was proof of that. :)
