Installation question

[divide0]

I am at the moment of this post running 9.04 (final release) via live CD, and everything seems to work out of the box.

However, I've noticed something: when prompted during installation via the "Advanced" option in step 6, I am presented with a drop-down menu on where to install grub. I choose one, then say "okay." However, when I click "Advanced" again to double-check, it resets itself to what it originally was! What's going on here? Anyone else experienced this?

EDIT: Just to make my question a bit more clear. Will grub install to the partition I selected after I select where I want it to and click "okay?" I am afraid it will not do so because it always resets every time I double-check.

[Qqmike]

Re: Installation question

Oh good gosh. I hope you are wrong. Is there no way to manually type a partition into the box, indicating where to install GRUB? I have the 9.04 live CD but have not yet had time to install. I was hoping this would be fixed & ready. If not, it'll cause a hell of a lot of forum questions. You can always use the Alternate installer CD, but then that requires keeping two on hand--using the live CD for rescue/repair is handy.

Be ready to fix it if the installer goofs it up for you.
Go ahead and try it (any way you wish) with the Live CD.
When you reboot, watch the screen to see where GRUB boot menu is coming from.
If it is coming from your "old" setup, great!
If not, then interrupt the boot menu by pressing "c" key and then reinstall GRUB (again):
grub>root (hdX,Y)
grub>setup (hd0)
grub>reboot
(Here, (hdX,Y) is the partition you used for the GRUB files for your old GRUB setup.)
That will boot you again, using your old GRUB setup.
But then you must fix your boot menu to include an entry for the new 9.04.
You can do it using (in your regular GRUB menu)

title 9.04 whatever
configfile (hdx,y)/boot/grub/menu.lst

where (hdx,y) is the partition you put 9.04 in.

All these tools are in my how-to:
-- How To GRUB Methods - Toolkit
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3081671.0

I'll be checking into this also soon, but I hope all this is not necessary.

[divide0]

Re: Installation question

Yeah, whenever I installed 8.04, I was able to manually type in (hd0,4) which is where I wanted grub installed. Apparently, It's simply a dropdown menu with "sda" notation; I couldn't type anything.

I've installed 9.04, but without grub for now, as my current setup requires the Windows bootloader.

On another note, the file /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc does not exist in my installation...

Is there any way to install grub to a specific partition (without writing over the MBR) post-install?

[Qqmike]

Re: Installation question

I tested it and it worked.

Manual
Step 6: Advanced
Drop-down list showed /dev/sda8
which is the root partition of the soon-to-be-installed 9.04.

It did work -- it did not mess up my existing GRUB boot manager.

> HOWEVER,

The GRUB in my GRUB partition (made with the GRUB files of 8.04.2) located on sda1 could not read the uuid statement in the 9.04 menu.lst (Error 15: File Not Found).
The menu.lst in the GRUB partition sda1 boots all OSs on my system using configfile:

title whatever OS
configfile (hdx,y)/boot/grub/menu.lst

So then I get a second menu.lst (from 9.04 in this case), from which I select the OS to boot.

The menu.lst in /boot/grub of the new 9.04 did not have a root statement for my Kubuntu 8.04.2 in sda2; instead it had this:

title Kubuntu 8.04.2 on sda8
uuid etc
kernel etc
initrd etc

So I had to edit it to read:
title Kubuntu 8.04.2 on sda8
root (hd0,7)
# uuid etc
kernel etc
initrd etc

(actually, you can leave the uuid statement uncommented)

> ALSO,
the drop-down list in Step 6 Advanced showed all 9 of my partitions correctly, but it also had another one:
sda-1

What is that?!

I don't like this, but that's the way it is, and in this limited test it worked.
One would have to test this in a system with two or three HDDs and several partitions.

I had other problems in 9.04: Couldn't find Konsole in the K-Menu; closed it; opened it; and Konsole was there. Couldn't open Konqueror as root (at Konsole using kdesudo konqueror); closed Konsole; opened it; tried again; and it worked.


You said:
"On another note, the file /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc does not exist in my installation... "

That's because you didn't have GRUB installed, so it looks like you did not even get the GRUB image files. Ouch.

You could copy any GRUB files into your 9.04, building /boot/grub and so on, but be aware that the GRUB in 9.04 seems to be a bit different from, say, the GRUB in 8.04.2 (the latter, for example, can't read a uuid statement but instead seems to require the older root (hdx,y) statement in menu.lst).

[divide0]

Re: Installation question

I realized that file wouldn't be there not long after I installed without grub...

So, you are saying it WILL install to /dev/sda5? I'll...give it a try, then.

EDIT: It worked! So, it was just a false alarm...

I just wanted to make sure it was safe before I tried it. Thanks!

P.S.: 9.04, for me, is more stable than 8.10. It's not quite as good as I was hoping (for example, some applications would not immediately install, then would magically succeed to install later on). Also, occasionally there are instances of graphical "weirdness," although nothing near as bad as KDE 4.0 or 4.1, at least as far as I'm concerned. However, it seems stable enough, at the moment. Wi-fi works right on install (a first for me). I'll just see how it goes from here...

[Qqmike]

Re: Installation question

divide0, Great! Glad it worked.

Your concern is valid, though. I'd rather see (hdx,y) typed manually into the box. The drop-down list of sdax, sdby, etc., should be OK; that is, it should be correct. It would be based on device.map that the installer makes, and in most normal setups, you can probably trust device.map (e.g., all SATA drives). But if you had a mixture of SATA and IDE, hmmm, many of us here know many cases where the installer got that picture wrong. One of my favorites, GParted Live CD, also uses sda, sdb, sdc, etc., but there you can open a terminal (double click on Terminal icon at top of screen) and explore for yourself (using fdisk -lu and using sudo grub then the GRUB geometry command).

I'm not sure what the sda-1 is, though (in the drop-down list I saw).

The other thing that goofed up in 9.04 when I did the above work was the edit function in the GRUB boot menu ("e") froze up on me and I had to hard reboot and start over. Somewhat glitchy so far. But it looks good (attractive).

Thanks for "forcing" me into a quick 9.04 install last night!
I'm going to take time soon and systematically work through a checklist of things I do here for setup and tools I use and experiments and see how 9.04 does. My fav so far is 8.04.2. I tried 8.10 repeatedly on HDD and on live flash drive and could not get things going very well. But, as I say, 9.04 sure as the dickens * looks * nice.