[PLUG] Need Help Editing Grub

[Mark Phillips]

Tony,

Thanks. After all my efforts to "fix grub", then move disks around failed. I
finally had to resort to booting with Knoppix and doing a grub-install on
the drive with the existing Linux distro which moved from hd1 to hd0. Should
have done that in the beginning....switch the drives, run a Knoppix,
grub-install, and be done with it. I am running Debian testing, and have
grub 0.97 installed.

Mark

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Tony Rick <tonyr42 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 1:42 PM, Mark Phillips
> <mark at phillipsmarketing.biz>wrote:
>
> > I have two ide drives in one machine - drive 1 is a Windows drive and
> drive
> > 2 is a Linux drive. Using grub, I can boot into either windows or debian.
> I
> > want to remove the windows drive and replace it with a larger, blank
> drive
> > for backup storage. I have a feeling if I just remove the first drive and
> > put the new one there, the machine will not boot, since the MBR is
> probably
> > on the first drive (it came with the machine, and I just added the second
> > drive for Linux). My questions:
> >
> > 1. How do I change grub on the Linux drive (hdb) to say "the windows
> drive
> > is dead, boot here instead, long live linux"?
> >
> > 2. Do I move the second drive to the first ide port, or leave it as the
> > second ide drive and put the new drive in the fist ide port?
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Mark
> >
>
> What Linux distro are you using?  Some more recent releases (eg Ubuntu
> Karmic) use grub2, a new rewrite of grub, that uses a different device
> numbering scheme and has a different menu.lst format (called grub.conf in
> grub2).
>
> That said, the simplest approach is to install the new drive as the first
> drive (replacing the Wx drive), and do a fresh minimal installation of
> Linux
> on the new drive.  The installation process should find all of usable OS
> installations and set up grub on the new drive accordingly.  The drawback
> here is that a default installation will use all of the new drive for one
> linux partition and one swap partition, so you would need to do some manual
> partitioning on the new drive either before or during the installation.
>
> There are more complicated solutions that require more detailed control of
> the grub install process (as mentioned in earlier responses), which would
> probably be a good exercise for you in any case.  Simply modifying the grub
> info on the existing Linux drive will not work once the Wx drive with the
> active MBR is removed, whether the Linux drive becomes the first or remains
> the second drive.
>
> - tony
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