Why GNU/Linux Rocks

[sgreger1]

Well, that answers my one question. Was about to go look at your "Installing Lubuntu" posts to see if you recommended it. Also, sgreger, it'd be helpful if you could give a definitive answer as to whether you're using UEFI or a bog-standard BIOS boot. It'll let me find answers for you faster if I only have to look up one or the other for you in order to give you the info you need, and you need to know this yourself so you know what steps you need to take in order to get things working. Don't get too discouraged with these setbacks, though. The first time is always the biggest pain in the ass, and aside from the odd bug that comes out of nowhere, it gets easier after that. Even with the bugs, it gets a lot easier once you know where to look for solutions, and can make an educated guess about what's causing the problems for you.

My BIOS is UEFI (Specifically x86_64 UEFI 2.x firmware). I think at this point I have everything in order I just need to know how to give myself the dual boot option as right now it just boots straight into windows (so I have undone whatever EasyBCD did).

So we are back at square one, a fresh install. What to do from here. One website says to boot form the live CD, choose the "try it before installing" option. Open a command prompt and then do this:

Here’s the quick and easy way to re-enable Grub.
1) Boot off the LiveCD
2) Open a Terminal and type in the following commands, noting that the first command will put you into the grub “prompt”, and the next 3 commands will be executed there. Also note that hd0,0 implies the first hard drive and the first partition on that drive, which is where you probably installed grub to during installation. If not, then adjust accordingly.

sudo grub
> root (hd0,0)
> setup (hd0)
> exit

Reboot (removing the livecd), and your boot menu should be back.

[sgreger1]

Okay so I just finished reinstalling it and now it has loaded me back to windows. So how do I go about using Grub to allow me the choice of which OS to boot at startup?

When you say pop in a live disc and schroot I have no idea what that means. Should I choose the "try before installing" option so that I can get into the Ubuntu desktop, then try to run the command schroot?

[shikitohno]

Well, that answers my one question. Was about to go look at your "Installing Lubuntu" posts to see if you recommended it. Also, sgreger, it'd be helpful if you could give a definitive answer as to whether you're using UEFI or a bog-standard BIOS boot. It'll let me find answers for you faster if I only have to look up one or the other for you in order to give you the info you need, and you need to know this yourself so you know what steps you need to take in order to get things working. Don't get too discouraged with these setbacks, though. The first time is always the biggest pain in the ass, and aside from the odd bug that comes out of nowhere, it gets easier after that. Even with the bugs, it gets a lot easier once you know where to look for solutions, and can make an educated guess about what's causing the problems for you.

[sgreger1]

The tutorial I was using told me I had to do that to get the option to boot either OS at startup. I've now realized that this was a bad idea and should have just left it to Grib 2. I popped in the live CD and chose to update an reinstall everything which takes about 45 minutes for some reason. Once that's done I'll have to figure out how to make it work with Grub.

[lxskllr]

I'm with shikitohno. I've always let GRUB handle the bootloader, and it's worked great. I've also used EasyBCD, but only in dealing with Windows installs. I try to stay away from anything MS in a mixed environment. MS doesn't like to play nice, and makes using non-MS stuff a PITA.

[shikitohno]

sgreger, I think the big question is why did you even use EasyBCD to begin with? This seems like an unnecessary additional layer of complexity, where simply using grub2-install /dev/sdX would have sufficed, or grub2-uefi if you need that instead. In my experience, grub has always worked fine with detecting a Windows install and automatically generating an entry in the boot menu for me. If I had to guess, you probably either need the grub2-uefi package to have it work on your system, or else you managed to successfully install grub2, and then overwrote the relevant files when you went and used this EasyBCD thing. I think it would probably be easiest to fix this with the magic of chroot. Pop in a live disc, chroot, and either use grub2-install /dev/sdX (X being the letter of the drive you have your /boot partition on, so if it's on the 3TB drive, /dev/sdb), or install grub2-uefi if necessary, and install your bootloader with that.

I've never heard of EasyBCD before, and I've gotten by fine with nearly 3 years now of not having used it at all, which is why I'm so confused about what made you think that step was necessary. Just to make that clear.

[lxskllr]

Check this thread out...

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1436662

That tutorial you have is too old. It may or may not work, but it's for a different version of GRUB, and Windows. Without me knowing exactly how, I can't endorse its use.

[sgreger1]

That's the spirit! Keep at it. Your computer freedom is at stake :^D

Seriously though. While you may run into bumps, there's a certain satisfaction you get by solving problems on your own. A little blood in the computer makes it run better :^)

Yah the real fun is trying to learn something new and figure it out. I am behind the times in regards to all things linux or command prompts in general. Is that utorial at least generally correct in that the reason I am being prompted "GRUB>" is because it needs me to tell it where to find the kernel /boot etc?


Edit: Found this one which has a screenshot that looks like what I am receiving:

http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/2011/04...-ubuntu-11-04/

[lxskllr]

That's the spirit! Keep at it. Your computer freedom is at stake :^D

Seriously though. While you may run into bumps, there's a certain satisfaction you get by solving problems on your own. A little blood in the computer makes it run better :^)

[sgreger1]

Got a link to that tutorial? GRUB2 has replaced GRUB, and it might be a different procedure. I don't know just by looking at it. This is where I'd be hitting DuckDuckGo.

http://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/in...ST&f=14&t=5025


Ive been trying to google it but I guess I don't know the right terminology to ask it I just woke up so i'll try again over on the linux forums. This has become my mission now to make this thing ****ing work and I will not sleep until I get it up and running.

[lxskllr]

Got a link to that tutorial? GRUB2 has replaced GRUB, and it might be a different procedure. I don't know just by looking at it. This is where I'd be hitting DuckDuckGo.

[sgreger1]

Okay, so I finally got it to work (well at least got to the next step). I had to get the drive to GPT fromat and shrink it some, which enabled me to at least get past the installation phase and create the necessary partitions. So it installs, I boot back into windows, I use EasyBCD to make Ubuntu a boot option when I start my computer. Everything works up until this point.

I restart my computer, it asks me which OS to boot, I choose Ubunu, it then goes to a command prompt that says "GRUB>" and I am not sure what to type. I know GRUB is the bootloader but it seems like I need to let it know where my various partitions and the kernel are at this point.

I think I found the right tutorial, can one of you guys look at this real quick and see if it sounds like the right thing I should be doing?

So here's how to boot a kernel with that > prompt:

You need to specify the GRUB "root". Root can mean a lot of things in Linux, but in this case GRUB just needs to know the drive where the kernel is that you wish to boot. The following commands use this information. Here's how you specify the "root" (note that I'm showing grub> for clarity, don't enter it):

(don't hit <enter> at the end... yet)

grub> root (hd

and then hit the <tab> key, GRUB will stick in a zero if you only have a single hard-drive or give you a list of drives if you have more than one. This first number is referring to a physical hard drive, not just a partition. Enter a comma and then hit <tab> again and you'll see a list of partitions to choose from next like this:

QUOTE
Possible partitions are:
 Partition num: 0, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7
 Partition num: 2, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x83
 Partition num: 3, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x4
 Partition num: 4, Filesystem type is fat, partition type 0xb
 Partition num: 5, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x82
 Partition num: 6, Filesystem type is reiserfs, partition type 0x83


This can help you choose the partition that has the Linux kernel on it if you're not sure. Pick a number and then type the remaining parenthesis and <enter> so a complete example line would look like this:

grub> root (hd0,5)

Now that's choose the kernel. If we're not sure the kernel is here, this next command will show us that, in which case you'd go back and choose another partition (or drive and partition if applicable in your situation):

(don't hit enter after this, yet)

grub> kernel /boot/

Hit <tab> again and you'll get a list of the kernels that grub sees on that partition in /boot. Isn't this cool? If it can't find any kernels, make sure you entered /boot after kernel and then go back to the previous root command and try a different one. Remember that GRUB counts beginning at zero so hda6 would show up in grub as (0,5). Assuming you find a kernel, type the unique letters to it (you can hit <tab> to finish it) and then enter a space to append "root=" on the end with the location of the Linux root directory. This root is the regular meaning of root in that it refers to where Linux normally mounts the "/" filesystem. Unless you've custom partitioned, it'll be the same drive and partition as where /boot is. This time you have to give it the term Linux uses to refer to that drive like "/dev/hda7". I don't think auto-complete works here so you'll have to be specific. Here's a sample line where /boot and / are on the same partition:

grub> kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6

Note that /dev/hda6 and (hd0,5) refer to the same partition.

The next command may or may not be optional depending on whether your system needs an initrd file to boot. If you don't think you need it, just skip this part:

(don't hit <enter> yet)

grub> initrd /boot/

Hit <tab> again to show eligible initrd files and type enough letters to auto-complete the rest with another <tab>. The final example line will look similar to this:

grub> initrd /boot/initrd

Note the above settings on some paper so you know what they are. Now the last command:

grub> boot
(hit enter)

If you get a kernel panic and a blurb about needing a root, then you probably forget to add the root= part on the end of the kernel line, and if you get an error message referring to initrd, then you need this line. This is also why you should write down the settings you use. Reboot, and try again.

Once you've booted you should edit GRUB directly (the above changes didn't install anything, it just got you running) or use your distributions boot loader configuration tool (in SuSE, I use the one in YaST under System) to edit grub using the parameters above.

[lxskllr]

You said RedHat supports it OOTB. Fedora would probably be a decent pick. I don't thins sgreger's ready for Arch yet :^P

[shikitohno]

As I understand it, the underlying issue for sgreger is this:

The kernel's CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION option must be set to 'y' to compile EFI partition support into the kernel; 'm', for a loadable module, is not sufficient. CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION is enabled (i.e. set to CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION=y) by default in the Arch default kernel; if you are running a different kernel, you can use zgrep CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION /proc/config.gz to check for this setting. This option is required even if GPT-formatted disks are used only for storing data and not for booting linux.

This option enables GPT partitions, which give you a maximum addressable disk size of 2 ZiB, which places sgreger's measly 3TB well within functional range. The issue with Ubuntu is that they appear to not have this option enabled by default in their basic kernel. Since sgreger is running into issues trying to pull off this partition, I think it's a fair guess that he's using a UEFI boot on his machine. So, basically his options are to either install Ubuntu and compile his own kernel to enable it (which I think would be a rather overwhelming, if fairly educational intro to linux), or he can install a distro that enables it by default and he should be able to install without any sort of issues. That's the theory anyway.

[lxskllr]

See this...

http://askubuntu.com/questions/56619...rd-drive-sizes