[4824] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Athena Installer Bug
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jacob Morzinski)
Thu Sep 9 14:20:39 2004
To: bugs@mit.edu, release-team@mit.edu
From: Jacob Morzinski <jmorzins@MIT.EDU>
Date: 09 Sep 2004 14:19:33 -0400
In-Reply-To: <bugs:26049@unknown-discuss-server>
Message-ID: <w6mu0u7mhje.fsf@prowler.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
<daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU> (Mahmood Ali) writes:
> I installed Athena in a computer with Windows and Linux, and the
> installer mistook both partitions for Win/Dos OS, so it missed up the
> loading command for linux in GRUB. It tries to load linux the same way
> it does with windows without loading the kernel.
I helped the user with this in the Sipb office, and suggested
that he send a bug report. I can fill in details that might be
missing above. The user has a laptop, and wanted to install all
three of Windows, plain RedHat, and Athena Linux. He started by
installing Windows and plain Redhat, and up to this point things
worked fine, and grub allowed booting one OS or another.
Then he used the Athena installer from /mit/bootkit/rhlinux/athena.img,
and when it was done, he was able to boot Athena, and Windows,
but could no longer boot the vanilla redhat partition. The
cause was that the Athena installer put in a brand new grub
with a new grub configuraion. In the new configuration, it tried
to boot the plain redhat partition by using something like:
title redhat
chainloader
rootnoverify (hd0,2)
(I'm typing those from memory, so may have made small errors).
These boot options didn't work.
We fixed the computer by booting into linux single-user mode,
and editing Athena's grub.conf file so that it added the full
grub config lines needed to boot the plain redhat linux:
title redhat
root (hd0,2)
kernel <something> ro root=<something>
initrd <something>
title redhat (single user)
root (hd0,2)
kernel <something> ro single root=<something>
initrd <something>
The user's computer worked after this change. In the end, there
were five grub entries. One for Windows with the chainloader and
rootnoverify, two for athena-linux which were successfully
created by the athena-linux installer, and two for redhat-linux,
which we copied from the redhat-linux's grub.conf and inserted
into the athena-linux's grub.conf.
-Jake
