[solved]need a little help installing grub after Kubuntu 10.10 install

[houndhen]

I have two hard drives - sda and sdb. I installed Kubuntu 10.10 to sdb1 and somehow allowed the MBR to be overwritten instead of putting grub on sdb1. After updating the install, I went into Mepis 8.5 and redone the MBR and edited menu.lst to use grub legacy as my boot manager. Here is the menu.lst entry in grub legacy for booting Kubuntu on sbd1:

# for Kubuntu on sdb1
title Kubuntu 10.10
root (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

I have searched the forum and looked at the thread at http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3109076.0 and http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3106368.0 and have printed out re-installing Grub 2 using live cd from the user guide. I have also printed out the chroot method (which I don't fully understand). What I need help with is which method is simplest and how to tell grub to be installed on the root partition of Kubuntu (sdb1)

Thank in advance,
Harold

[oshunluvr]

Re: need a little help installing grub after Kubuntu 10.10 install

grub-install /dev/sdb1




Although I'm wondering why go through all the chain loading. Why not just boot to grub-pc and have a working boot menu

[houndhen]

Re: need a little help installing grub after Kubuntu 10.10 install

grub-install /dev/sdb1




Although I'm wondering why go through all the chain loading. Why not just boot to grub-pc and have a working boot menu

By grub-pc, I assume that you mean Grub2. The answer is that at my age I resist change just for the sake of change. I have learned a little about grub-legacy and now along comes Grub2. I like and understand more about using grub-legacy than Grub2. Menu.lst is a text file that I know the location of and can edit easily. I multi-boot several linux distros as well as Window XP. Why? Because I like to look at and learn from different distros. I only actually do my work in one or two at a time. I keep XP because of work that I do in Quickbooks. I also use Gnucash in my main linux distro.

One of the distros that I have had for a long time is Mepis. It uses grub-legacy for its boot menu. I can use it to re-write the MBR with a gui instead of the command line. I realize the power of the command line and use it when I have to. Most of the time, I don't know the command to do what I want to do. By the time I find the command, I could have done what I wanted to do with the gui several times if it is possible to do with the gui. Man pages are really hard for me to get useful information from. It may be that I am just lazy. However, from my prospective, there is a lot of stuff to learn and I like to learn new stuff about computers but there is a tremendous amount of stuff that I will never be able to understand. I hope this doesn't come across as negative. It's just me.

Ubuntu and its many flavors are really the best option for someone just coming over from Windows. The forums are really great and helpful. If I was going to recommend a Linux distro to someone it would be some flavor of Ubuntu, Mepis, or PCLOS.

Another question...Is there a spot in the Kubuntu installation that would let me choose to put grub in the root partition instead of overwriting the MBR? Maybe I missed it. Sometimes it is sort of hidden.

Thanks,
Harold

[houndhen]

Re: need a little help installing grub after Kubuntu 10.10 install

OK as usual when trying to do something unfamiliar, things don't go exactly as planned.

I am using the Kubuntu live cd and the konsole. I am going by the 'Installing or re-installing Grub2 using a live CD' from the user guide on the forum. I entered the following commands:
sudo fdisk -lu - got the list of partitions and noted sdb1 is where Kubuntu is installed
sudo mkdir /media/sdb1
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1
sudo mkdir /media/dev
sudo mount --bind /dev /media/dev
sudo grub-install /dev/sdb1

and I get the following output:
/user/sbin/grub-probe: error: cannot find a device for /boot/grub (is /dev mounted?)

I tried the 'sudo mount --bind /dev /media/dev' command again that the output said it was already mounted.

So, is there something wrong with what I did?
What else should I try?

Thanks,
Harold

after edit
Will mark this as solved. Solved it by re-installing Kubuntu and putting grub in the root partition.