[NBLUG/talk] Help with Grub2

[Omar Eljumaily]

How are you trying to accomplish multi-boot?  If each OS has its own 
disk, the easiest way to accomplish that is to F12 at boot (or whatever 
the bios says) and select the disk.

You should also be able to enter grub at boot time on the primary disk, 
mount the disk you want, and the boot into it.  If you want a menu that 
pops and gives you a selection, I had this problem with Windows XP and 
7.  I had to use a free proprietary software that does it.  I didn't 
find any open source utilities that would do it.

Omar


On 9/9/2014 9:43 PM, Peter Lutz wrote:
> I'm trying to multi-boot a machine with three disks holding Ubuntu
> 14.04, 12.04 and Windows Vista.  Each disk will boot and run fine if
> it's the only disk in the machine.  When I plug all three in, I can
> boot off each disk if I set it as first in the BIOS.  When I set to
> boot of the disk I want to run as the primary. I can only boot that
> disk.  I've run grub-install /dev/sdb    and     update grub several
> times to no avail.  The best I can get is   error: no such device
> UUID=xxxx....  The other system just reboots.
>
> I have several other multi-boot machines that all work fine, one with
> a dozen systems on it.  The strange thing I notice about the problem
> machine is that synaptic shows grub-common, grub-pc-bin, grub-pc,
> grub2-common and grub-gfxpayload-lists all installed but
> dpkg-query -l grub*    shows NO grub packages installed.  The other
> machines all agree between synaptic and dpkg-query that all five
> packages are installed.
>
> The question:  Can I use synaptic to un-install the five grub
> packages and then re-install them without loosing the machine
> completely?  I don't care whether it takes apt-get or synaptic
> to re-install.  Does any one have any idea if this will help?
>
> I did loose booting once while working on the machine and used
> my Boot Repair disk to get it going again.  Could this have messed
> things up?
>
> Thanks for any help.
>
> Peter