Dua boot Fedora 16 and Mint 12

[tech291083]

Hi,

I want to dual boot Fedora 16 32 bit and Mint 12 32 bit. I have created 3 primary partitions, one for swap, one for Fedora 16 and one for Mint 12. I installed Fedora to sda1 and its Grub to the MBR. Then I installed Mint to sda3 and its Grub to sda3. Now when the pc boots, it does not show Mint on the boot menu and it only shows Fedora, why so? I think Mint 12 also uses Grub2, right? Here is the page on Distrowatch web site that says so.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mint

Here, sda1 is for Fedora and sda3 is for Mint. While sda2 is swap partition. I installed Fedora first and then Mint.
Please help me, thanks. Here is what I see in Fedora in a terminal.




[root@localhost john]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000db6d0

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 634882047 317440000 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 634882048 645367807 5242880 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3 645367808 976773119 165702656 83 Linux




[root@localhost john]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 298G 3.2G 280G 2% /
devtmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /dev
tmpfs 2.0G 92K 2.0G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 2.0G 40M 2.0G 2% /run
/dev/sda1 298G 3.2G 280G 2% /
tmpfs 2.0G 40M 2.0G 2% /run
tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /media

[tech291083]

Here are the screen shots of a tool called Disk Utility, so that you can have a proper idea, thanks. As per he second screen shot, Mint is not mounted, is it what is wrong?

[sonoran]

Try running
# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
and see if os-prober finds Mint.

I'm not familiar with Mint, but there are some issues with installing grub2 to a partition (instead of mbr). It's possible something went awry there.

[tech291083]

Try running
# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
and see if os-prober finds Mint.

I'm not familiar with Mint, but there are some issues with installing grub2 to a partition (instead of mbr). It's possible something went awry there.

Thanks, but I need to run that command in a Fedora terminal, right?

[sonoran]

Yeah, as root. So sudo if you've configured that, or
su -
<enter root password>

[tech291083]

ok, here it is in Fedora.


[root@localhost john]# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.conf
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.3.7-1.fc16.i686.PAE
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-3.3.7-1.fc16.i686.PAE.img
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.1.0-7.fc16.i686.PAE
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-3.1.0-7.fc16.i686.PAE.img
No volume groups found
Found Linux Mint 12 Lisa (12) on /dev/sda3
done


Here is some content of the /boot/grub2/grub.conf file in Fedora, which I have not modified at all. Here is the content of a portion/paragraph called /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober




### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###
menuentry "Linux Mint 12 32-bit, 3.0.0-12-generic (/dev/sda3) (on /dev/sda3)" --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
insmod part_msdos
insmod ext2
set root='(hd0,msdos3)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 791c77e5-5819-442d-9199-7a6fd0543056
linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-12-generic root=UUID=791c77e5-5819-442d-9199-7a6fd0543056 ro quiet splash vt.handoff=7
initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-12-generic
}
menuentry "Linux Mint 12 32-bit, 3.0.0-12-generic (/dev/sda3) -- recovery mode (on /dev/sda3)" --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
insmod part_msdos
insmod ext2
set root='(hd0,msdos3)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 791c77e5-5819-442d-9199-7a6fd0543056
linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-12-generic root=UUID=791c77e5-5819-442d-9199-7a6fd0543056 ro recovery nomodeset
initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-12-generic
}

### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###

I think I have done the installation right, but there seems to be some little modification that I need to and you please help me do so, thanks a lot for your help so far.

[sonoran]

Does the option to boot Mint appear in the grub2 menu now when you reboot? The "recovery mode" part is suspicious.

If Mint doesn't boot properly, but puts you into some sort of recovery shell, there are a couple things you can try. The first is to enter
grub2-install --force /dev/sda3
which works in Fedora but might not in Mint.

Reboot into Fedora and run the "grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg" again, then reboot and see if Mint works.

If it doesn't, and you're back in recovery mode again, I would run
grub2-install hd0

That should put Mint's grub2 onto the mbr. It really makes no difference which grub2 controls the booting as long as you can boot both systems. If you really want to you could then do the same thing in Fedora (grub2-install hd0), so you would get Fedora's grub2 again.

Assuming I'm right about all that, what happened is that the attempt to install Mint's grub2 to the sda3 partition didn't work. Grub2 really doesn't like being on a partition, so the --force option is required.

[tech291083]

Oh, it works now ie Mint boots and so does Fedora. I made a silly mistake. I typed the following command in fedora.


grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.conf

In fact the right command is, the one that you have given me.


grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

What an idiot I am. Apologies for the trouble I have caused you. Thanks a lot.

If I want to check Grub version in Mint, then the command should be..

grub --version

right?

[sonoran]

Great that you got it working - nice job. I've never tried Mint, but I think they use some different commands with grub2 than Fedora does. You can check by running "man grub" or "man grub2" in a Mint terminal.

[nonamedotc]

If I want to check Grub version in Mint, then the command should be..

grub --version

right?

If I remember right, mint used grub2. To check the grub2 version,

grub2-install -v
grub2-install (GRUB) 2.00~beta4

This is from Fedora of course but this is the command you would need to use. If not, use grub-install -v.

To work more with GRUB management in Mint, I would recommend looking at this thread. (http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=197&t=84055) It might be interesting .... Cheers.