Where/how can I learn and gain complete control of my MBR?

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CloudWalker
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30 Sep 2010, 2:49 pm

leejosepho wrote:

#######################
title > Linux Puppy 511
fallback 4
find --set-root --ignore-floppies
root=/dev/sdc15 pmedia=atahd
kernel /boot/vmlinuz initrd initrd.gz
savedefault --wait=2
#######################

I had been told the "fallback" and "savedefault" lines in each entry did not need to be there, but either or both were actually what had been holding Debian back from "taking over" my MBR as I had expected.

I don't think that's the cause of problem. "fallback 4" means that if you selected "Linux Puppy 511" and grub can't boot that entry, it will immediately try to load entry #4 without telling you. "savedefault" simply makes "Linux Puppy 511" the default entry on your next boot (in grub's menu, not the partition).

leejosepho wrote:

Oh well. KillDisk is running again, but only on one drive this time around.

Sorry, to hear that.

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01 Oct 2010, 8:27 am

CloudWalker wrote:

"fallback 4" means that if you selected "Linux Puppy 511" and grub can't boot that entry, it will immediately try to load entry #4 without telling you.

I had suspected that was part of a loop mechanism, and I think that "4" actually sends it back to the beginning. Each next-entry in the list has the next-greater number.

CloudWalker wrote:

"savedefault" simply makes "Linux Puppy 511" the default entry on your next boot (in grub's menu, not the partition).

Yes, and Debian's GRUB loader took over the next time around after that had been removed, and Debian's GRUB loader then sent my machine to my backup drive (and thereby trashing it) because it is my first PATA and GRUB gets confused (different numbering system) by the presence of my SATA drive.

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CloudWalker
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01 Oct 2010, 6:50 pm

leejosepho wrote:

Yes, I've heard of Debian's installer doing a poor job of setting up grub on multiple disks. It seems more prevalent when using more than one controller.

What get my head scratching is, if I understand correctly, your 1st reboot is fine. It only took over after you booted Debian. Now, that is not something I haven't head of and if you don't find out the cause, it's hard to prevent it from happening again.

What is the boot loader you get on the first boot after installing Debian? I get the impression that it's Windows'. Did you boot Debian then? By Windows→Grub4dos? And how far did the boot process of Debian go? My thinking is this: Grub4dos should load the kernel directly without invoking Debian's grub and so it seems like it's something Debian did in the boot process.

leejosepho
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01 Oct 2010, 10:30 pm

CloudWalker wrote:

What get my head scratching is, if I understand correctly, your 1st reboot is fine. It only took over after you booted Debian.

I might not be explaining this well enough ...

When I installed Debian, I included having Debian's installer also install a GRUB loader-n-menu at "C" (hd0), and Debian booted and ran from there ... but as an aside here: I had thought I could share Mint's "/home" with Debian and that part of this little experiment trashed both Mint and Debian ... but I bet I am the only guy in the world who ever had Debian displaying a Mint desktop! But in any case, and now after knowing I had some "repair work" work to do anyway ...

At that point, I installed GRUB4DOS to experiment with it a bit and to try to use it to boot my Puppy installation left unfound by Debian's GRUB-loader-n-menu ... and I had no success there. And now ...

At *that* point, I could still get to everything on my machine by using SuperGRUB (only), so I continued working on GRUB4DOS ... and that is when someone told me to remove those "fancy stuff" lines ... and it was the next time around that Debian's GRUB-loader-n-menu sent my machine off to a wrong drive ... and then it was a couple of hours later when I finally gave up trying to fix the beginning of my first drive and pulled KillDisk out of its sleeve.

CloudWalker wrote:

... if you don't find out the cause, it's hard to prevent it from happening again.

Oh, I know the cause well enough: Listening to people who do *not* know what they are talking about!

Silly me.

CloudWalker wrote:

What is the boot loader you get on the first boot after installing Debian?

The one Debian had installed, and it worked fine for the few OS' it found during installation.

CloudWalker wrote:

My thinking is this: Grub4dos should load the kernel directly without invoking Debian's grub and so it seems like it's something Debian did in the boot process.

I believe you are correct, and things only began going screwy after those "savedefault" lines had been removed from that very-special GRUB4DOS menu.

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Fuzzy
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01 Oct 2010, 11:50 pm

Correct you cannot share /home partition between distros because the configuration files for the user are stored there. Now if they were different user names, then its probably possible, but... i still wouldnt.

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leejosepho
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02 Oct 2010, 1:06 am

Fuzzy wrote:

Sharing "/swap" and "/temp" is okay, yes? Any others?

I have heard it is okay to share "/boot" also, but I do not intend to take any kind of chance there.

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leejosepho
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02 Oct 2010, 6:43 pm

Some of you fine folks might almost get a chuckle out of this, but first let me tell you I am not doing this on my primary machine. Oh no. But anyway ...

I have my "testing" machine sitting here with some Windows on it, and I am trying to get those Windows and Puppy to multi-boot and play nicely together ... and now we have come to a truly ironic spot:

After getting nowhere on my own, I reformatted the Puppy partition *again* and I let Puppy's installer "take over" and *automatically* -- I stayed way back out of the way and just it go -- write some kind of GRUB on my MBR ... and now Windows are all I get! What a trip.

Puppy's own installer cannot write a loader to get it booting, and neither can SuperGRUB or even SuperGRUB2 (the overall worst) ... but SuperGRUB2 (I think) actually *did* get my Windows back via GRUB even though it cannot find Puppy at all.

More to follow ...

... and how did you spend your day today, eh?!

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leejosepho
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02 Oct 2010, 8:19 pm

Update: According to certain error messages I am seeing, I am fairly sure the problem here is a conflict (incompatibility) between the older "XP Boot" version of GRUB4DOS and whatever newer GRUB now comes along with Puppy. So, the next step here is to try the newest version of GRUB4DOS without having the Puppy installer do anything beyond OS installation ... and then trying to make a boot for it later.

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CloudWalker
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02 Oct 2010, 9:49 pm

Sharing /tmp is fine, the files there are deleted regularly anyway.
Sharing /swap is fine if you don't use hibernation.

Sharing /home is fine if you use different user name in each distro. If you use the same name, besides possible conflicting config, you'll also run into permission problem unless yet set the gid/uid manually.

leejosepho
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07 Oct 2010, 10:30 am

CloudWalker wrote:

Sharing /home is fine if you use different user name in each distro. If you use the same name, besides possible conflicting config, you'll also run into permission problem unless yet set the gid/uid manually.

Yes, that "config" issue really got me, but I was the same-named "user" in each OS. So, I think I will re-do that with "usermint", "userdeb" and so on. However, I do have Puppy Linux in a primary partition -- the others are in logicals -- all its own on a different drive, and I will leave it alone right there by itself. Overall, I would say it is the most versatile OS in my machine.

New discovery here: I think a lot of the difficult I have been having has been coming from the just-learned fact I cannot set a drive order of my own choosing in my BIOS and "make it stick". No operating system (other than Win98) seems to care whether the SATA drive or the PATAs are/is first -- they will each run just fine from wherever they are. However, and this is the latest "shocker" (at least for me):

My system will *not* let me order the SATA drive as first and then boot from it exclusively. I can only boot from the SATA if/when the PATAs are disabled ... and all of that now seems to explain things like when Debian's GRUB loader did not (actually could not) work at first but then suddenly did begin working after I had removed those "savedefault" lines from the GRUB4DOS menu.lst and had thereby essentially "turned it loose". So for all this time, I have been unknowing booting from my first PATA drive that just happens to be a clone of the SATA ... and that is how I have been booting at all! I can do anything I wish that will run on this machine, but anything related to the MBR or boot sector will *only* work *after* I have updated the clone that actually ends up doing the booting! I had mentioned one of the effects of that a few days ago, but I have just now finally understood what had happened.

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leejosepho
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07 Oct 2010, 10:30 am

leejosepho wrote:

CloudWalker wrote:

Yes, that "config" issue really got me -- I was the same-named "user" in each OS. So, I think I will re-do that with "usermint", "userdeb" and so on. However, I do have Puppy Linux in a primary partition -- the others are in logicals -- all its own on a different drive, and I will leave it alone right there by itself. Overall, I would say it is the most versatile OS in my machine.

New discovery here: I think a lot of the difficult I have been having has been coming from the just-learned fact I cannot set a drive order of my own choosing in my BIOS and "make it stick". No operating system (other than Win98) seems to care whether the SATA drive or the PATAs are/is first -- they will each run just fine from wherever they are. However, and this is the latest "shocker" (at least for me):

My system will *not* let me order the SATA drive as first and then boot from it exclusively. I can only boot from the SATA if/when the PATAs are disabled ... and all of that now seems to explain things like when Debian's GRUB loader did not (actually could not) work at first but then suddenly did begin working after I had removed those "savedefault" lines from the GRUB4DOS menu.lst and had thereby essentially "turned it loose". So for all this time, I have been unknowing booting from my first PATA drive that just happens to be a clone of the SATA ... and that is how I have been booting at all! I can do anything I wish that will run on this machine, but anything related to the MBR or boot sector will *only* work *after* I have updated the clone that actually ends up doing the booting! I had mentioned one of the effects of that a few days ago, but I have just now finally understood what had happened.

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My search ended at 59 ... right here on WrongPlanet.
==================================

leejosepho
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12 Oct 2010, 3:54 pm

Well! Everything works perfectly now, and I still have “complete control” -- I did not have to give up or *lose* control -- over my MBR.

More specifically:

I have not had to let any installer or loader “take over” and replace or overwrite anything ever written by any other ... and that means I can later fix or edit any loader at all without ever compromising the function or integrity of any other.

Whew.

Windows loaders can only load Windows, of course, but EasyBCD has made it possible for me to add a Windows-executed link to Mint 9's GRUB2 loader where it (GRUB2) actually *had* picked up and added Win7's loader to its (Mint's) own GRUB2 menu (even though GRUB2 could not find Arch or Puppy on my machine) …

... but now I do still need to learn how to edit a GRUB2 menu in order to rename a mis-pointed link that actually reboots the machine (and that is a good thing) rather than moving on to a Windows OS it "thought" it had found. So then, and overall:

My machine now boots into Win7's BCD menu where there are links to Win7, Mint's loader and to "ntldr" (for "boot.ini") where Wins 98, 2K, XP and a link to a menu loader for Arch and Puppy can be found:

============================
; “boot.ini” via “ntldr” for 98-2K-XP & Arch-Puppy menus
[boot loader]
timeout=8
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
c:\="Windows 98 lite"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows 2000 Pro" /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /FASTDETECT
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(5)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Pro" /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /FASTDETECT
c:\grldr="Arch & Puppy (Linux) & Return"
============================

Then, that last-in-line “c:\grldr=" link can call for GRUB4DOS (grldr) to send my machine looking here:

============================
######
# (0) Arch Linux
title Arch Linux
root (hd2,8)
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/9858224f-7c09-4042-842c-bbe0e1e336a1 rootflags=rw vga=773
rootfstype=ext2 ro
initrd /kernel26.img
######
# (1) Arch Linux Fallback
title Arch Linux Fallback
root (hd2,8)
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/9858224f-7c09-4042-842c-bbe0e1e336a1 rootflags=rw vga=773
rootfstype=ext2 ro
initrd /kernel26-fallback.img
######
# (2) puplinux
title Puppy Linux 5.1.1
rootnoverify (hd2,4)
kernel /vmlinuz pmedia=atahd
initrd /initrd.gz
######
# (3) /io.sys
title Windows 98 lite (io.sys)
root (hd0,0)
chainloader (hd0,0)/io.sys
######
# (4) /ntldr
title Windows XP-2K-98 (ntldr)
root (hd0,0)
chainloader (hd0,0)/ntldr
######
# (5) /bootmgr
title Windows 7 Menu (bootmgr)
root (hd0,0)
chainloader (hd0,0)/bootmgr
######
# (6) mbr
title Windows 7 Menu (via MBR)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
######
# (7) reboot
title ReBoot
reboot
######
# (8) halt
title ShutDown
halt
######
============================

... and the really neat thing about all of this is the fact of having no dead-end menus! Each menu has an option to head back to/toward first, and the Linux menus include reboots and a shutdown.

Pretty neat, eh?!

I sure like it.

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My search ended at 59 ... right here on WrongPlanet.
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CloudWalker
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12 Oct 2010, 11:06 pm

leejosepho wrote:

kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/9858224f-7c09-4042-842c-bbe0e1e336a1 rootflags=rw vga=773

Unless Arch has made some strange patch, I think /dev/disk/by-uuid/ is create by udev and not available to the kernel. The common syntax is "root=UUID=9858224f-7c09-4042-842c-bbe0e1e336a1".

leejosepho
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13 Oct 2010, 8:38 am

CloudWalker wrote:

leejosepho wrote:

kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/9858224f-7c09-4042-842c-bbe0e1e336a1 rootflags=rw vga=773

Unless Arch has made some strange patch, I think /dev/disk/by-uuid/ is create by udev and not available to the kernel. The common syntax is "root=UUID=9858224f-7c09-4042-842c-bbe0e1e336a1".

I will have to go take a look to see whether I can figure out how that line got written. The Arch installer had placed a "/boot/grub/" folder on Arch's /boot partition, but I do not think I copied from there the "menu.lst" file I am actually using. With at least three kinds of GRUB on this machine, I had told the Puppy, Mint and ARCH installers to each make their own "/boot/grub" folders, and then I also ran GRUB from inside Puppy to make yet another ... and I might have told Puppy's GRUB to put that last one in the ARCH /boot partition. So, and if this is making any sense: That line you have referenced might not have come directly from either ARCH or ARCH's GRUB.

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leejosepho
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19 Jan 2012, 3:01 pm

Whew! I finally have *exactly* what I had wanted but had abandoned trying well over a year ago ....

... and without making even the slightest alteration to *any* MBR on *any* HDD in my system!

Using a USB-ZIP device set in my BIOS as my system-boot device, I can now have at least Puppy Linux actually installed in my multi-boot system without messing anything up ... and at least in theory, this kind of approach *could* be used to resolve all matters of conflict between Windows and Linux ... at least during bootup.

Note: Recently running the latest Mint even only in "live" mode turned out to be a bad idea. It installed itself on one of my USB-ZIP devices without asking, it ignored my main monitor and displayed itself on my second monitor off at the side, and it added some kind of "permissions" file or whatever on the HDDs in my machine. Talk about arrogant, eh?! Some Linux folks like to swear at Windows over mere boot problems, but at least Windows leaves Linux partitions alone and just as they are!

But in any case ...

I still have a little menu.lst tweaking to do to get each Puppy OS booting since my machine and Windows and Linux do not all see my devices in the same order, but here is my present Grub4Dos menu.lst that will ultimately get the overall job done ...

Quote:

# menu.lst produced by grub4dosconfig-v1.7
##
### note: This menu.lst file was first made by Grub4Dos
### from within Puppy (Slacko) and placed on the USB-ZIP
### device therein selected as the desired boot device.
### However, GRUB could not later find this menu.lst
### at system boot until it (this menu.lst) had been
### placed within a /grub folder on system-default "C".
######
##### ( GRUB first always tries to execute this "find" line ...
##### ( find /menu.lst, /boot/grub/menu.lst, /grub/menu.lst
##### ( ... then drops out to GRUB and the machine ultimately
##### ( hangs if /grub/menu.lst is not on system-default "C"
##### ( when GRUB next tries that "find" line a second time.
##### ( Note: Quickly pressing an arrow key right after GRUB's
##### ( first "find" attempt will stop GRUB from continuing
##### ( on and will display this menu (with no timeout) ...
##### ( >
##### ( > find /menu.lst, /boot/grub/menu.lst, /grub/menu.lst
##### ( > command line
##### ( > reboot
##### ( > halt
##### ( >
##### ( That might be because the puppy installer had placed
##### ( that on the USB-ZIP MBR (during USB-HDD formatting),
##### ( and then Grub4Dos had later added itself and the same
##### ( kind of call without noticing the overall redundancy.
######
### With /grub/menu.list placed on "C", the desired USB-ZIP
### can be ordered first-in-line in the system BIOS and used
### to boot this machine into *any* operating system present
### without the default MBR (Windows) ever having been altered.
### The USB-ZIP being used here had first been formatted
### within the Puppy installer, "recommended" as "USB-HDD".
### During its own run, Grub4Dos had said the USB-ZIP
### did not appear to have its boot flag set even though
### GParted later showed it set, so GParted was used
### to un-flag and then re-flag the USB-ZIP just in case
### there actually might have been a flag problem there.
##
#
color blue/cyan yellow/blue white/black cyan/black
timeout 80
default 0

# Frugal installed Puppy

title Puppy slacko 5.3.1 (sdf2) *drops to "press any key"*
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /puppy_slacko_5.3.1.sfs
kernel /vmlinuz pmedia=usbflash pfix=fsck
initrd /initrd.gz

title Puppy slacko 5.3.1 (sdf2) RAM mode *drops to "press any key"*\nBoot up Puppy without pupsave
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /puppy_slacko_5.3.1.sfs
kernel /vmlinuz pmedia=usbflash pfix=ram,fsck
initrd /initrd.gz

title Lupu 528 (sdb8) *booting fine*
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /lupu_528.sfs
kernel /vmlinuz pmedia=atahd pfix=fsck
initrd /initrd.gz

# Boot from Partition Boot Sector

title Windows XP/2K (sdf1:PBS) *sdf1? - booting HDD via USB-ZIP?*
chainloader +1

title Windows 7 (sda1:PBS) *booting via system "C"*
map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map --hook
chainloader +1

# additionals
title Bootup from HDD *system hangs -- CTRL/ALT/DEL required*\nBootup from the master boot record of the hard disk drive
map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map --hook
chainloader (hd0)+1

title Find Grub menu on HDD *repeats initial "find" looking for menu.lst*
map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map --hook
errorcheck off
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /menu.lst && configfile /menu.lst
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /boot/grub/menu.lst && configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /grub/menu.lst && configfile /grub/menu.lst
errorcheck on
commandline

title Find Grub2\nBoot up grub2 if installed *results in "press any key"*
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /boot/grub/core.img
kernel /boot/grub/core.img

title Grub4Dos commandline\n(for experts only)
commandline

title Reboot computer
reboot

title Halt computer
halt

_________________
I began looking for someone like me when I was five ...
My search ended at 59 ... right here on WrongPlanet.
==================================

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