Bug 10503

> 1) Grub 2 doesn't get installed,
what does it mean ?

have you special other os, was working for 90% of case of multibooting in the qa

Source RPM: powerdns => drakxtools-curses

(In reply to Manuel Hiebel from comment #1)
> > 1) Grub 2 doesn't get installed,
> what does it mean ?
> 
> have you special other os, was working for 90% of case of multibooting in
> the qa


Hi Manuel,

I have downloaded 3 isos, KDE live CD, Gnome live DVD 32bit & 64 bit. My laptop is quite a generic one. I call it that as all distros get installed in it. It is a Lenovo Thinkpad T400.

In all of the isos, when getting installed, Grub2 refused to get installed. Only Grub got installed, and when I try to add another Linux OS--I wrote the correct vmlinuz and the partition no, UUID--it simply wrote the lines in the menu list wrong.

It wrote "BOOT_IMAGE=Ubuntu 13.04" in the middle of the first line, then in initrd, there was nothing after the initrd.img, whereas it should have the full name of the Ubuntu generic kernel.

These, of course could be very easily corrected in the menu list later, but only for those, who know how to. I like Mageia's boot screen, so I decided to add all other Linux distros to the menu list manually. I still only have Grub, but not Grub2, and if I try to change it through the Mageia Control Center, it simply won't work.

My laptop is really a generic one, it installs every Linux & BSD flavour I tried to install and test.

I don't have MS Windows in my laptop, but, Mageia sees a Windows installation, but never a Linux one. I have divided my hard disk this way; the 1st partition is ntfs, 2nd, FAT32, 3rd ext3, 4th extended for Linux. The 4th has Mageia, Sabayon & Ubuntu precise, raring & saucy,

I think its not good to ask the users to find out the vmlinuz and so on and add them manually in the installation time. Most don't even know what is a kernel. I also didn't at the beginning, but after Linux got into me--a long time ago--I lost interest in Windows. As a Windows user, I never knew about a kernel.

Hope you can get rid of this problem.

Take care!

Created attachment 4137 [details]
mk-grub2-rescue script

(In reply to Chanath DeSilva from comment #2)
> (In reply to Manuel Hiebel from comment #1)
> > > 1) Grub 2 doesn't get installed,
> > what does it mean ?
> > 
> > have you special other os, was working for 90% of case of multibooting in
> > the qa
> 
> 
> Hi Manuel,
> 
> I have downloaded 3 isos, KDE live CD, Gnome live DVD 32bit & 64 bit. My
> laptop is quite a generic one. I call it that as all distros get installed
> in it. It is a Lenovo Thinkpad T400.
> 
> In all of the isos, when getting installed, Grub2 refused to get installed.
> Only Grub got installed, and when I try to add another Linux OS--I wrote the
> correct vmlinuz and the partition no, UUID--it simply wrote the lines in the
> menu list wrong.
> 

Grub2 is not installed by default, did you select to use it at the summary page of the installer?

Grub legacy in Mageia does not support multibooting grub2 systems automatically, although this can (as you suggest below) be done manually.

> It wrote "BOOT_IMAGE=Ubuntu 13.04" in the middle of the first line, then in
> initrd, there was nothing after the initrd.img, whereas it should have the
> full name of the Ubuntu generic kernel.

If you are referring here to grub legacy - then that is expected and is unsupported.

> 
> These, of course could be very easily corrected in the menu list later, but
> only for those, who know how to. I like Mageia's boot screen, so I decided
> to add all other Linux distros to the menu list manually. I still only have
> Grub, but not Grub2, and if I try to change it through the Mageia Control
> Center, it simply won't work.
> 

What exactly happens when you use mcc->boot to attempt to set up grub2? (Run mcc from a root terminal to see error messages)

> My laptop is really a generic one, it installs every Linux & BSD flavour I
> tried to install and test.
> 
> I don't have MS Windows in my laptop, but, Mageia sees a Windows
> installation, but never a Linux one. I have divided my hard disk this way;
> the 1st partition is ntfs, 2nd, FAT32, 3rd ext3, 4th extended for Linux. The
> 4th has Mageia, Sabayon & Ubuntu precise, raring & saucy,

I'm guessing these are all grub2 systems (except Mageia) so this is expected.
You really should be using Mageia with grub2 to be able to detect all those (I know at present you can't ;)
> 
> I think its not good to ask the users to find out the vmlinuz and so on and
> add them manually in the installation time. Most don't even know what is a
> kernel. I also didn't at the beginning, but after Linux got into me--a long
> time ago--I lost interest in Windows. As a Windows user, I never knew about
> a kernel.
> 
> Hope you can get rid of this problem.
> 
> Take care!

I would be interested to know if the attached script works for you, it is still undergoing testing, but should produce a grub2 boot CD or boot USB stick for your system. If it does work then we will know that there is basically nothing odd about your hardware and that grub2 works.
All your systems should be listed and should boot from the CD/USB stick.

Read the notes in the script and simply follow the prompts. If you have manually created a /boot/grub2/grub.cfg file during experiments please rename it before running the script. 

If the USB write option offers to write to any device that does not appear to be your USB stick do not continue. (CTRL/c will abort).

CC: (none) => zen25000

Created attachment 4139 [details]
mk-grub2-rescue script v 0.8

Fixed silly bug in script.

Attachment 4137 is obsolete: 0 => 1

Reporter, could you please reply to the previous question? If you don't reply within two weeks from now, I will have to close this bug as OLD. Thank you.

Keywords: (none) => NEEDINFO

If you use the script to generate a boot stick/CD then update to the latest version first. The URL is in the script.

Assigning to Barry Jackson who worked on this bug report until now.

CC: (none) => stormi
Assignee: bugsquad => zen25000

Please test grub2 on your system by using this script to create a boot CD, DVD or USB stick - it will not alter your current bootloader.

https://wiki.mageia.org/en/User:Barjac

Please report the results here in the next two weeks, or this bug will be closed as old.

Thanks.

Since there are insufficient details provided in this report for us to investigate the issue further, and we have not received feedback to the information we have requested above, we will assume the problem was not reproducible, or has been fixed in one of the updates we have released for the reporter's distribution.

Users who have experienced this problem are encouraged to upgrade to the latest update of their distribution, and if this issue turns out to still be reproducible in the latest update, please reopen this bug with additional information.

Closing as OLD.

Status: NEW => RESOLVED
Resolution: (none) => OLD