[Novalug] Triple Boot Woes : SOLVED -- sort of ...

[Beartooth]

 	I Beartooth wrote a lot of stuff, on this list, under 
this list, and on gmane's Fedora, CentOS, and Ubuntu lists, 
trying to get my testbed machine to boot to and run all three of 
those OSs.

> ... I want to install CentOS 5.1 again, Ubuntu 7.10, and Fedora 
> 8.

> (If I were doing it all over, perhaps I should do the 
> partitioning first and separately, with knoppix or gparted, or 
> with qtparted if that has a live cd. Maybe I should Dban the 
> whole shebang, and repartition first anyway ...)

 	Well, I did do it all over; I wish I knew more exactly 
*how* I did it. I'll outline it, and maybe one of the gurux here 
can generalize and polish it into a real recipe.

 	I did DBAN the whole hard drive before anything else.

> I *think* I'll be safer to install Ubuntu first, and with the 
> GUI .iso, *not* with the text-install, which I lack the savvy 
> to use.

 	Previous failures, and a lot of invaluable help with them 
from people here, taught me the reverse. I installed CentOS 
first, with manual partitioning, creating a /boot partition, a 
main one for C5, and a swap partition -- leaving the rest of the 
space free, iirc.

 	When I got C5 through firstboot, I did a little minimal 
configuring, to have a usable desktop and a couple of things I 
expected to use, such as gparted a/o qtparted.

 	Then I installed F8, again with manual partitioning.

 	When I got F8 through firstboot and another minimal 
configuration, I rebooted another time. Sure enough, booting to 
C5 now failed.

 	So I set up a gnome terminal with two tabs each su'd to 
root, and another workspace with gparted running -- not doing 
anything, just looking.

 	I opened F8's /etc/grub.conf with a text editor on one 
root tab; on the other, I did "mkdir /TEST" followed by "mount -t 
ext3 /dev/sdax /TEST"

 	Then cd /TEST, followed by ls and cd some more, till I 
got to a grub.conf or a menu.lst

 	(NB:you have to use sd in F8, where you'd use hd in C5 or 
U7; start with x = 1, and keep looking till you can see from the 
file names that you're in the one for C5; there is no space 
between the third / and TEST.)

 	At that point, with c&p between the tabs, I cloned an 
entry for C5 into the configuration for F8.

 	Then I cd'd out of the mounted partition, unmounted it, 
and rebooted to make sure. Now C5 and F8 did both boot 
successfully.

 	So I installed U7, again with manual partitioning; it 
insisted, as the others had not, on making an extra partition -- 
God knows why. I bit my fingernails, and kept going.

 	After the install, to no surprise on my part, I could 
boot to both F8 and U7, but C5 had disappeared.

 	Now comes a (probably evitable) heresy to Ubuntians.

 	I booted to U7's rescue, or minimal, or whatever; got to 
the root prompt at the end of it; commanded "passwd" and gave it 
a root password; and rebooted into regular U7.

 	Now I could again set two terminal tabs to root.

 	Those of you actually comfortable with sudoing, and not 
worried about timing out while you study things at length, may 
want to skip the heretical root password.

 	Again I launched gparted (which I had had to get from 
synaptic) to look with -- and this time mounted both U7's own 
partition and one of the others. (I had to do it that way, 
because I didn't find a way to simply cd from root to what turned 
out to be /boot/grub/menu.lst; but with U7's partition once 
mounted under /root, I could edit it.)

 	Now I got to the bottom of menu.lst, below the F8 entry 
which I knew worked; and copied/cloned an entry for C5 onto the 
bottom of it.

 	When I got back out of everything, lo and behold!, all 
three OSs did boot successfully.

> ... does anyone know of an example somewhere of a grub.conf, 
> for a machine running three linuces, which I can manage to 
> clone once I do get all three installed?

 	I never found one. I'm not completely sure where the one 
that works is, but I believe (once I finish customizing) I'll be 
able to get to it and post it or email it, if anyone asks.

-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, Neo-Redneck Linux Convert
F8; C5.1; U7.10; Alpine 1.0, Pan 0.132; Privoxy 3.0.3;
Dillo 0.8.6, Galeon 2.0.3, Epiphany 2.20, Opera 9.25, Firefox 2.0
Remember I know precious little of what I am talking about.