Need Help with OS selector
I Have follow exactly Mark Wharton instructions in Post 3666 How to install second operating system, to install Ubuntu 10.4 with out luck. I my case it is 3 operating system beside 2 Installations of windows XP. I Have no problem to Boot with OS Selector in any of my windows XP installation, my problem is that OS Selector can't "pick up" Ubuntu installation.
Any Ideas? Thanks for Help. Regards Peter D
post 3666
"I would not use the auto install feature to install Ubuntu or you will end up with the Linux boot manager, GRUB, installed to the Master Boot Record (MBR), which you may not want to do if you intend to use Acronis OS Selector as the boot manager.
While you can create all of the partitions from the Ubuntu partitioner, you might as well use Disk Director (DD) to create them. Decide on the number and size of partitions that you want. A good starting point is to create three partitions; one for the operating system (root), one for a swap partition (swap), and one for user files (home). All can be logical partitions. The root partition needs to be about 10 GB, swap needs to be the size of your RAM, and home is up to you. Using Disk Director, format root and home as ext3, and swap as Linux swap. Give each partition a name so that you can easily tell them apart.
When you run the Ubuntu installer, choose manual partitioning. You will not need to format the partitions; just select each one and choose "Mount". Watch carefully when you step through the steps in the installer and be sure to install GRUB to the Linux root partition; not to the MBR. You may find that the Ubuntu Alternate Install CD gives you more control over this process than the normal Ubuntu Live Desktop CD.
After installation then you can get OS Selector to detect the Linux installation and add it to your OS Selector menu."
Peter,
The reason OS Selector didn't recognize Ubuntu 10.04 is because it uses GRUB2 as a bootloader, and OSS doesn't recognize it because its new and OSS hasn't been updated for quite some time.
I would assume Mark's suggestion to load GRUB (not GRUB2) into the root partition should solve the problem. But if all you have is the 10.04 installation disk I don't know if it has both GRUB and GRUB2 on it, or just GRUB2. You may need to get a different version of GRUB from another source before proceeding.
If for some reason it still doesn't work try installing an earlier version of Ubuntu that doesn't use GRUB2 like 9.10 (I think 10.04 was the first to use GRUB2). Then upgrade to 10.04 through Ubuntu's update manager. I've just gone through the same thing as you, and was able to get it to work OK once I figured out what the problem was. In the Ubuntu installation process the place where you specify which partition to load GRUB into isn't real obvious, its in screen 6 of 7 as I recall, and there's a button called "advanced" that you have to press to see where its going to load GRUB. It defaults to MBR, so I assume you already know this or you would be complaining that OSS isn't running at all because GRUB wrote over your MBR.
On a side note I finally decided to just load GRUB into the MBR and use it as a bootmanager instead of OSS. Figured what good is a bootmanager that doesn't recognize the latest boot code anyway. Plus you have to select Linux once with OSS, then go into GRUB and select Linux again, so it seemed redundant to have to choose twice instead of just once.
Hi Mark
Thank you for response.
When I type command sudo grub I get message about missing command.
I installed Ubuntu v 10.4 I think it comes with grub2 boot loader
Hi Doug,
Thank you for taking your time responding to my post. I am "very new" using Ubuntu as a operating system. It looks good, and is very fast to load even from cd or usb drive. I Think loading grub2 into the MBR will solve my problems. Is it easy to use? can it be reversed to Acronis OS selector?
Thanks again Regards Peter D
Peter:
Check your package manager for something called "grub legacy" (I'm unsure of the exact name) and install it. Or Doug's advice is also good - you don't need OS Selector if using some version of GRUB as a boot manager.
Hi Peter,
Before loading GRUB into the MBR use disk director to save your current MBR.
In Disk Director, click on the boot drive at the far left (just to the left of the first partition, the part that shows the drive size) Then select 'edit' from the options in the left margin and hit F2 to go into hex mode. You should be at the start of the drive (first sector). Click the cursor to the first byte and pull down "edit/write to file" (sorry doing this from Linux so I don't have the screen in front of me so it might be slightly different, but you get the idea). Select a file name to write to, set offset to 0 and size to 32256, that will copy the first 63 sectors to a file. If you want to put the MBR back later just copy that file back in by putting the cursor at the start and 'edit/read from file', offset 0, size 32256. This will copy the partition table and all, if you just want the MBR alone the size is 446 instead of 32256. Also if you search there are places to get fresh Windows MBR code on the web, so you're really not risking anything by installing GRUB over the MBR.
You could do this twice, once with OSS enabled, again with it disabled for the original windows boot sequence without OSS running.
GRUB will recognize windows partitions and give you those options at boot time, just like OSS, its just text based rather than graphical, so yes its very easy.