grub doesn't "see" Fedora on triple boot system

[pottzie]

I'm brand new to Fedora. I ran the live cd and installed Fedora. I then installed OpenSUSE and Mint. When Mint formated the hard drive, Fedora wasn't in the graphic, even though sda1 was ext4 and sda3 was lvm2. When Mint rebotted, Mint and OpenSUSE were on the menu, but Fedora wasn't.
Any way to get it back?

[glennzo]

LVM trips me up so I don't know how far I can go with this, but let's see.....

What's running the boot show? Mint's grub of Suse's? Boot it and mount the Fedora partition. Copy the top stanza of Fedora's boot menu and paste in into Mint's or Suse's grub menu (whichever menu is handling booting). If you get lucky you'll be able to boot Fedora. In case you don't know how to mount the partition, something like this:

su -c 'mkdir /media/fedora'
su -c 'mount -t ext4dev /media/fedora'

From there you should be able, as root, to access Fedora's boot menu to grab the text.

I'm assuming here that Fedora is on an EXT4 partition? If not, post the output of the command

su -c 'fdisk -l'

please and tell us where Fedora should be.

[pottzie]

The first two commands got me a tutorial, inside Mint. But 'fdsk' returned:
Disk /dev/sda: 80.1 GB, 80060424192 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9733 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x6635f736

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 26 204800 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 * 2454 9733 58476600 5 Extended
/dev/sda3 26 2453 19497984 8e Linux LVM
/dev/sda5 2454 4870 19414521 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 4871 4960 722893+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7 4961 6877 15398271 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 6878 8178 10450251 83 Linux
/dev/sda9 8179 9661 11912166 83 Linux
/dev/sda10 9662 9733 578308+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

So it's there. Now how canI get there from here?

[glennzo]

The first 2 commands got you a tutorial? You need to mount the Fedora partition, whichever one that may be, and copy the top boot stanza from it's grub menu into Mint's boot menu. So.... Which partition holds Fedora?

[stoat]

The first 2 commands got you a tutorial?

I think pottzie is referring to the command --help text that often appears when a terminal command has an error.

su -c 'mkdir /media/fedora'
su -c 'mount -t ext4dev /media/fedora'

That first command is okay, but wouldn't produce any output since it only creates a directory. But the second one has a syntax error. It produced this when I ran it...

$ su -c 'mount -t ext4dev /media/fedora'
Password: 
Usage: mount -V                 : print version
       mount -h                 : print this help
       mount                    : list mounted filesystems
       mount -l                 : idem, including volume labels
So far the informational part. Next the mounting.
The command is `mount [-t fstype] something somewhere'.
Details found in /etc/fstab may be omitted.
       mount -a [-t|-O] ...     : mount all stuff from /etc/fstab
       mount device             : mount device at the known place
       mount directory          : mount known device here
       mount -t type dev dir    : ordinary mount command
Note that one does not really mount a device, one mounts
a filesystem (of the given type) found on the device.
One can also mount an already visible directory tree elsewhere:
       mount --bind olddir newdir
or move a subtree:
       mount --move olddir newdir
One can change the type of mount containing the directory dir:
       mount --make-shared dir
       mount --make-slave dir
       mount --make-private dir
       mount --make-unbindable dir
One can change the type of all the mounts in a mount subtree
containing the directory dir:
       mount --make-rshared dir
       mount --make-rslave dir
       mount --make-rprivate dir
       mount --make-runbindable dir
A device can be given by name, say /dev/hda1 or /dev/cdrom,
or by label, using  -L label  or by uuid, using  -U uuid .
Other options: [-nfFrsvw] [-o options] [-p passwdfd].
For many more details, say  man 8 mount .

The "tutorial" (mount --help).

If /dev/sda1 is the Fedora boot partition as post #1 implied, then it might work like this...

su -c 'mount -t ext4 /dev/sda1 /media/fedora'

[glennzo]

Thank you for the correction Stoat. I referred to my notes for that line. Wonder where I got ext4dev from? Must have been some other distro.

[pottzie]

I tried that and got:
Partition table entries are not in disk order
pottzie-desktop pottzie # su -c 'mount -t ext4 /dev/sda1 /media/fedora'

So I did it again.

pottzie-desktop pottzie # su -c 'mount -t ext4 /dev/sda1 /media/fedora'
mount: /dev/sda1 already mounted or /media/fedora busy
mount: according to mtab, /dev/sda1 is already mounted on /media/fedora
pottzie-desktop pottzie #

It blows my mind to discover that I can see the partition of one OS from the terminal of another one. Let alone that it's possible to read files in it. Yeah, I'm new. Fedroa is in sda1.

[glennzo]

If the Fedora partition is already mounted you should be able to do this:

su -c 'cat /media/fedora/boot/grub/menu.lst'

You'll see the whole file (not too large at all) scroll down the terminal screen. You should also be able to copy the proper stanza from that file and paste it into the controlling boot menu. Reboot and you should have an option to boot Fedora.

[pottzie]

This doesn't look good:
pottzie-desktop pottzie # su -c 'cat /media/fedora/boot/grub/menu.lst'
cat: /media/fedora/boot/grub/menu.lst: No such file or directory

Although it certainly explains why grub didn't see it. When I loaded Fedora, I did have an error saying that something wasn't able to be mounted, but when I rebooted everything seemed to work OK. I figured as long as everything was working, all was well.

[glennzo]

su -c 'ls /media/fedora/boot' and su -c 'ls /media/fedora/boot/grub/'. Anything in those folders?

[pottzie]

pottzie-desktop pottzie # su -c 'ls /media/fedora/boot
> su -c 'ls /media/fedora/boot/grub/
Unknown id: /media/fedora/boot/grub/

What's funny is that Fedora did boot. I've seen flashbulbs that stayed lit longer than the screen it gave, but it booted. I see that I left off the last single quote, so I gave it another shot:
su -c 'ls /media/fedora/boot'
ls: cannot access /media/fedora/boot: No such file or directory

[glennzo]

You either have the wrong partition or Fedora is gone. What is on partitions sda5,7,8 and 9? Can you post the content of the current menu.lst, the one that is booting the system?

[pottzie]

As I have OpenSUSE and Mint, those are what I suppose are on sda5,7,8 and 9. For whatever reason, linux distributions spread their respective systems across separate partitions. Probably so when a newer version comes out, the home files can be separate and the update doesn't have to mess with the personal files and can change the "box" and leave the contents be.
How do I get to the menu.lst?

[glennzo]

Open a terminal and type

su -c 'cat /boot/grub/menu.lst'

That will show the boot menu and give us some clue as to what distribution is booted from where and give us an idea of what's supposed to be on some of the different partitions.

[stoat]

pottzie-desktop pottzie # su -c 'cat /media/fedora/boot/grub/menu.lst'
cat: /media/fedora/boot/grub/menu.lst: No such file or directory

Hello everybody,

Since /dev/sda1 is a separate boot partition, when you mounted it to /media/fedora then there was not a /boot subfolder in the mount point. Try looking in /media/fedora/grub for the grub.conf file instead of /media/fedora/boot/grub.