My main Linux computer (64bit CPU) is about six or seven years old now
and has had a number of distributions running. As I haven't had any
luck with upgrades, I've always done a complete installation.
Currently the Grub boot menu has a number of choices:
openSUSE
Advanced options for openSUSE
openSUSE 12.1 (x86_64)
Advanced options for openSUSE 12.1 (x86_64)
Debian GNU/Linux (6.0.5)
Advanced options for Debian GNU/Linux (6.0.5)
Debian GNU/Linux (6.0.4)
Advanced options for Debian GNU/Linux (6.0.4)
There are a number of things that I find puzzling.
First of all, the most recent installation is Debian Wheezy/Testing
(7.0), and, in fact, WebMin tells me that the installed Operating
system is Debian Linux 7.0. In order to boot into what is now my
default Linux, installed on /dev/hda I have to select the seventh
option of the menu which is mislabeled as 6.0.4.
I had successfully installed some of the distributions on other
than /dev/hda, but the last several installation have been on the
Primary Master HD.
The computer boots well with the seventh entry in the menu, which is
not the default. This is rather annoying.
I have become thoroughly confused by the information I've found about
grub2. I am not a hardware person and am rather loathe to make any
changes to the boot loader, given my current high degree of mental
entropy.
I thought about switching to lilo and, in fact, tried that out
successfully on a laptop running Wheeezy in a VM. When I tried that on
the tower /sbin/lilo complained that it couldn't open /etc/lilo.conf,
even though I used sudo. Fortunately, my act of desperation didn't
render grub inoperable.