Skippy VonDrake wrote:
> I have multiple partitions, Ubuntu installed on one and grub2
> installed in the MBR.
The BIOS will only boot one MBR. Fortunately it can be shared between
Ubuntu and Debian okay. Since your primary one is Ubuntu I would use
it to boot both.
> When I installed Debian (6.07) on a new partition I wanted to install
> grub for that partition but was unsuccessful.
> Used the "Advanced Install" process and reached the "Grub install"
> options but kept getting a red screen saying it was unsuccessful.
What was the error? At that point press Alt-F4 and look at the
installer console screen. Hopefully there will be some clue there as
to the problem.
> During the partition stage I gave Debian 2 partitions ('/' and
> '/home') and made '/' bootable.
The "bootable" flag is legacy and AFAIK no longer used nor relevant.
It was an old MS-DOS thing.
> I know this partition is '/dev/sda6' and gparted verifies this.
You should be able to boot this partition manually by booting grub
from the MBR installed by Ubuntu. Then stop the countdown and enter
command line mode.
Unfortunately at that point the instructions are completely different
depending upon whether it is grub 1 or grub 2. So I will just say
that it is possible to enter the commands manually and boot either
system. There is even TAB completion of the filenames.
Grub 1 is simple. Just enter the commands. Simple. Grub 2 is much
more complicated and really too complicated to enter everything by
hand. But editing the configuration on the fly is quite reasonable.
Select edit and modify one of the existing entries. Works well enough.
Having booted the system itself you should be able to run the
grub-install command from the command line and debug it further.
> The reason for wanting grub (or grub2) also installed in the Debian
> partition is because I plan on installing the Xen hypervisor.
> That way when I do "update-grub" from within Debian, it will update
> the "right" config files and give a new menu during the boot process.
Sure. You will need to debug why the MBR installation failed.
> So my question is: how do I install grub (or grub2) into the root
> partition of Debian to allow chainloading?
> I have no problem re-installing Debian if that is the best choice.
By what you have said so far I don't see any reason for it to not
work. Hopefully the errors on Alt-F4 or the command line will be
clueful.
The chainloading would be from the first to the second. The first
loader knows it is chainloading to a second one. The second one does
not know about this and thinks it is the first one. You probably know
this but saying it because it wasn't clear by what I read.
Bob
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