grub 2 sees but won't boot salix on dual boot Ubuntu/Salix
Posted: 27. Jun 2013, 02:55
A slightly unusual situation. My onboard SATA controller has gone on strike. I've ordered a new motherboard but for the moment I'm limited to a usb connected external hard drive. So, no CD (it's a SATA Internal) means if I screw up the bootloader I'm SOL until I get my new mobo. And if none of the installation CDs I've burned in the past work (which is quite possible, they are all kind of old and not in the greatest condition -- and the ghost of Murphy lives in my house) I'll still be SOL. So I booted the Salix iso (not a real CD, the iso on my external usb hard drive) and installed it to the first partition where a borked Debian was sacraficed. But when it came time to install LILO I chickened out, because if I screw up the bootloader, with no CD drive, I don't see a pathway to fixing that until my new hardware comes and I get a little panicky when comtemplating the idea of having NO working computer for a few days. So I booted into Lubuntu Precise with Mate on another partition and ran update-grub. Rebooted. Salix was on the Grub menu. Cool. But when I select Salix it starts and fails during the text in tty part of the boot process. [BTW, my highest praise to whoever had the good sense to make the default font in the tty big enough for a normal human to read. Why is such a common sense thing so darn rare in the nix world?]. So I presume update-grub put a line in one of grub-2's eleventy-seven config files that is ALMOST right but not quite. I'm thinking that if I can find the right file, and the not-quite-right line and edit it appropiately, it should boot Salix fully and that this would be a low risk way of attempting it that shouldn't put my Ubuntu Precise installation at risk. I realise y'all mostly aren't grub fans, and I'm interested in trying LILO later but my experience with messing with bootloaders is that are 10 ways to break it for every way that works. That's why I'm looking to try a minimalist change that is extremely unlikely to put my sole remaining bootable OS at risk.
Any suggestions?
Any suggestions?