Gentoo!

[englishpremier]

just thougt you'd be pleased to know that i almost have a fuly working gentoo system with gui. infact i'm currently writing this from it.

I have 2 hard drives, 1 80gig (primary ide controler, winxp pro) devided into 5 partitions and one 13gig drive (secondary ide gentoo /dev/hdc) into 4 partitions running gentoo.

Now so that i didn't mess up my other drive i only had the 13gig drive connect when installing gentoo and configured Grub accordingly:

default 0
timeout 5
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.7-11
root (hd0,1)
kernel /kernel-2.6.7-gentoo-r11 root=/dev/hdc4 vga=792
#title=Windows XP
#rootnoverify (hd0,0)
#makeactive
#chainloader +1

whenever i swtich between windows and gentoo i have to unplug the windows drive inoder for gentoo to load, windows however will load wether or not the gentoo drive is pluged in.

could you tell me what i need to put in my grub.conf to have both drives in together and the ability to boot into either gentoo or XP. I did start but then never followed through.

 

[Mpemba Effect]

Firstly, make a backup of your grub.conf before making any changes. Here is your new grub.conf. The changes are in pink.

default 0
timeout 5
splashimage=(hd[color=deeppink]1[/color],1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.7-11
root (hd[color=deeppink]1[/color],1)
kernel /kernel-2.6.7-gentoo-r11 root=/dev/hdc4 vga=792

title=Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

uncomment the section you have on windows xp it looks good to me. Once done reboot and go into BIOS, set to boot from your 13G drive before your 80G drive in the boot priority section.

 

[englishpremier]

didn't work.

After making the changes i ran:
# grub-install --root-directory=/boot /dev/hdc

but it said that hd0 = /dev/hdc

I'm guesing that i must somehow get it to say that hd0= /dev/hda

Do i need to enter my 80gb drive's information in "fstab" ?

 

[Mpemba Effect]

You don't need to run grub-install. Grub is already installed. Are both drive plugged in when you boot?

 

[englishpremier]

Originally posted by Mpemba Effect
You don't need to run grub-install. Grub is already installed. Are both drive plugged in when you boot?

oh ok, but yeah both drives are in as i can use fdisk /dev/hda then p to view the partitions of my 80gig drive. It seems the problem is that grub deffinatly thinks that hd0 = hdc instead of hda.

 

[Mpemba Effect]

Originally posted by englishpremier
oh ok, but yeah both drives are in as i can use fdisk /dev/hda then p to view the partitions of my 80gig drive. It seems the problem is that grub deffinatly thinks that hd0 = hdc instead of hda.

It is definately NOT grub. The grub device naming is dynamic. hd0 always = the first IDE drive, hd1 always = the second IDE drive etc regardless of what the linux device names are.

So if the 13G drive is on IDE2 and as master it's linux name will be hdc. If it's the only hard drive plugged in the system it's grub name will be hd0. If you then plug in the 80G on IDE1 as master it's linux name is hda and since it's the first drive (IDE1 comes before IDE2) it's grub name will now be called hd0 and the 13G will be called hd1. This is the reason why I ammended your grub.conf hd0 entries to hd1.

 

[Mpemba Effect]

Just wondering how many of you folks who tried Gentoo in this group install-fest is still using it

 

[afraser2k]

I'm not. I got fed up with using Linux after realising my work will not change their Microsoft-orientated software so there's no point in me struggling with it. I have enough trouble working with Win2K Server and Novell Netware 5 without having to add Linux support to confuse me even more. I've decided to learn how to code in Java instead.