Can't figure out how to get Mandriva grub bootloader to recognize Ubuntu and display it as an option?

Question

Hey, I previously had ubuntu 10.04 installed on my system and today i just thought it would be interesting to install a KDE desktop environment linux system beside the gnome based Ubuntu. So, i heard that mandriva is the best of kde(even though its also good with gnome) so i installed it unto a separate partition and on startup, i no longer get an ubuntu menu but instead the mandriva Grub loader. The windows 7 system i have installed is detected by GRUB but unfortunately ubuntu is not.. I guess that is because ubuntu uses Grub2 as its default bootloader and mandriva uses legacy grub. Do you have any suggestions on how to make this work. If you can make it work on either bootloader it will be fine for me so long as i have the options to run both of them and not only one. I'm still new to all this so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

what you need to do is find your ubuntu grub.conf and find the line that actually boots your ubuntu,

copy the full entry to kwrite



then, in mandriva, open a terminal and su to root and type



grub



press enter



type



find /grub.conf



press enter, if it says file not found, type



find /boot/grub/grub.conf

(i think that grub.conf is located there but i'm not 100% sure - so you will have to type the correct path if mine is wrong)



you should be presented with something like hd0,3



type



quit



press enter



now change the entry in your kwrite file to reflect this, all the entries -



for example - from kernel (hd0,4)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31.13-desktop586-1mnb + initrd (hd0,4)/boot/initrd-2.6.31.13

to kernel (hd0,3)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31.13-desktop586-1mnb + initrd (hd0,3)/boot/initrd-2.6.31.13



save the changes



now in your terminal, type



kwrite /boot/grub/menu.lst

(lst = list NOT 1st)



copy the entries in your kwrite file to the end of menu.lst, leave a space like in my example



example -

title windows

root (hd0,0)

makeactive

chainloader +1



title mandriva 2010.1

kernel (hd1,4)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=UUID=66ad03d1-f7c1-40ec-9c3a-89b50fb36dcb resume=UUID=70bdc49d-fac7-47dc-a0cc-d61259b3d545 splash=silent vga=788

initrd (hd1,4)/boot/initrd.img



save changes and exit,



type



reboot



press enter



you should have your ubuntu entry at your grub screen, choose it and if all goes well you should boot into ubuntu

Answer 2

The GRUB file is in /boot/grub/menu.lst, and you need to be root to edit it. The easiest way to open it as the root user is to open a terminal and run this in it: sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst (and you'll be prompted for your password). Be careful when editing the file. It's pretty straight forwards but there is a risk that if you screw it up you won't be able to boot any more. Have backups of your data just in case. If you don't want to see the boot menu at all then edit the timeout line. If you just don't want to see some of the boot options then delete (or comment out) the corresponding sections.

Answer 3

have you tried IRC chat rooms, a lot of help there