Daul Boot F10 From Existing Grub.conf

[jbkt23]

I have a dual boot arrangement on my server so that I can tweak the distro updates before I default to them. The method I use is to install the latest over the oldest maintaining the existing grub. This I have done for several updates. Today I installed F10 over my old F6 while maintaining the current F7 install. When the install was finished I rebooted to F7 to edit grub.conf for the F10 kernel. When I made what I thought were the appropriate entries and then rebooted I get something to the effect of the following error immediately after the kernel line:

Error: bad file descriptor or directory...

Here is my grub.conf lines for the new kernel:

title Fedora 10
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64 ro root=UUID=49bfb6a6-79d9-4f90-91c6-6d9bd081f65e quiet #iommu=noaperture
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64.img

One question I have is why root on the kernel line is pointing to the disk UUID instead of the disk label? I have mounted the new install from F7 and have looked at fstab and see that / is identified by the UUID there also. I copied and pasted the UUID to the kernel line so I'm sure they match.

[stoat]

Here is at least a possibility to consider. Starting with version 9, Fedora started using file systems with 256-byte inodes. It all surfaced last summer when people discovered that they could not always boot Fedora 9 from the GRUB menus of earlier versions. Anyway, it was a problem with the grub package which was eventually patched starting with grub-0.97-21. So when those people updated the grub package in the old system to a patched version and also then re-installed its GRUB boot loader, they could then launch F9 from it.

You should check the grub package version in your old system...

rpm -q grub

If it's earlier than v0.97-21, then yum update it and then re-install the GRUB boot loader with it. If the grub package has already been updated, you still need to re-install the GRUB boot loader with it for it to make any difference for this 256-byte inode issue. If you have the new grub version and know that you have already re-installed the boot loader with it, then this is not the cause of your trouble.

Try booting other Linux systems with chainloader or configfile. They're both "immune" to breakage by kernel updates. And the chainloader command doesn't even care about the 256-byte inode business.

[jbkt23]

So would it be reasonable to install the latest grub update for Fc8 on Fc7? I just grabbed it from updates version 0.97-33.1 for 64 bit.

[jbkt23]

Whether it was reasonable I did it and now am able to boot into F10. So, thanks for pointing me to a solution Stoat.