Hello bug-grub people, I encountered a subtle "gotcha" in using GRUB. I had to loop through the documentation and trials several times before I realized what was happening.
Here is the story, I have a 7 or 8 year old Red Hat installation on /dev/hdb. Red Hat has been happily running Grub 0.93 and booting all kinds of disks. Everytime I put something else on /hda or /hdc I could add another line to grub.conf and I'd eventually get it right. Then I installed a brand new huge UserLinux--Debian system on /hda ... complete with a brand new Grub 0.95 installation on /hda. To boot my old /hdb system I copied the appropriate stanzas from /hdb/.../boot/grub/grub.conf into the /hda/boot/grub/menu.lst Like this ### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST title Red Hat with hard root device in fstab root (hd1,0) #1 kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-28.8 ro root=LABEL=/ #2 kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-28.8 ro root=/dev/hdb7 initrd /initrd-2.4.20-28.8.img It turns out that Red Hat linux has a /etc/fstab table that mounts the root partition using "Label=/" syntax. The two ways of mounting root are: Label=/ / ext3 0 0 0 #### Mounts / by seeking the Label "/" /dev/hdb7 / ext3 0 0 0 #### Mounts / by seeking a physical disk So the bug was... the grub line labeled #1 failed with "file not found". Fixing grub to the #2 above caused the boot process to start and the RedHat init process on /hdb7 mounts the root filesystem on /dev/hda! So I was perpetually mounting the Debian partition labeled "/" on /hda while I wanted to mount the partition labeled "/" on /hdb The fix required was to edit the /etc/fstab on /hdb disk to mount physical disks NOT search for LABEL=/. The mount process in Linux goes through the disks starting with /dev/hda. The label "/" on /dev/hdb is never found. Well, what a merry chase I had with that little thing. The problem is how to put this in the GRUB documentation so people see it? Thanks, and Grub is really a pleasure. Lee McKusick _______________________________________________ Bug-grub mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-grub