[4825] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Athena Installer Bug
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Thu Sep 9 14:28:48 2004
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In-Reply-To: <w6mu0u7mhje.fsf@prowler.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 14:28:42 -0400
To: Jacob Morzinski <jmorzins@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@mit.edu, release-team@mit.edu
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It's worth noting that RedHat will do the same thing - it doesn't
play nice with other Linux installations - it wants to install it's
boot loader in the MBR by default and will look for fat/vfat
partitions in order to add an entry for DOS/Windows, but will ignore
other Linux partitions. So there was no "right" order to do this -
getting Redhat to coexist with other Linuxes (including itself) is
hard.
-Jon
At 2:19 PM -0400 9/9/04, Jacob Morzinski wrote:
><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
--
-------------------
Jonathan Reed
jdreed@mit.edu
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