MEPIS Community Forum

I have a system with 4 sata drives in it, I initially installed Mepis to Sdc with all the other drives disconnected but then found I could not access my ntfs partitions after the drives had been reconnected and Mepis booted. I then reinstalled to Sdc with all the drives in place and had grub placed on the boot drive MBR (sda) where windows and wubi ubuntu sit.
'Grub error 17'
So I then used windows repair to restore my mbr.
Then reinstalled Mepis again to sdc but this time had grub placed in the mbr of sdc.
I now get drives not found for the Mepis bootup and the only windows boot that works is for sdb but my windows is not on that drive.

Here is a copy of menu.lst
timeout 10
color cyan/blue white/blue
foreground ffffff
background 0639a1

gfxmenu /boot/grub/message

title MEPIS at sdc1, newest kernel
root (hd2,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdc1 nomce quiet splash vga=788
initrd /boot/initrd.img
boot

title MEPIS at sdc1, kernel 2.6.36-1-mepis-smp
root (hd2,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.36-1-mepis-smp root=/dev/sdc1 nomce quiet splash vga=788
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.36-1-mepis-smp
boot

title Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition at sda1
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

title Microsoft Windows XP Professional at sdb1
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

title MEMTEST
kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin


Also here is the result of sudo blkid in Ubuntu

/dev/loop0: UUID="9d96ecaa-cce9-47be-9b65-8e7cee18a4b8" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sda1: UUID="78846A268469E6DA" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda2: UUID="4548-07E3" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sdc1: UUID="6d054420-046c-4a7c-9170-5ee1727b6a67" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sdc2: UUID="3aa8a6e2-87cc-48c9-9fc1-b428dea1519c" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sdb1: UUID="BEA683EA7308F219" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sdd5: LABEL="Terror Bite" UUID="01C9887A068F44D0" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sde1: SEC_TYPE="msdos" UUID="4483-73F0" TYPE="vfat"


Can someone out there see an answer ?

maybe research here> http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/grub-2.html Jerry

From the live disk, open a terminal, then

su
grub

grub> root (hd2,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit

That should get you booting to your new MEPIS install. You may have to edit that install's menu.lst file to get your other installs to boot from there.

Edit (addition): Also, from the live disk, use gparted or equivalent and set the 'boot' flag for hd0.

Once you've done the above, edit your menu.lst file to look like this:

Yes. It looks like the two Windows were confusing GRUB as to where they were. Mainly because Windows likes the first hard disk/partition in a system and GRUB knows it. Mapping should fix that problem.

Welcome to the forum.

Changing the Mepis drive to hd0,0 fixed it but I don't begin to understand it.
Seems a bit counterintuitive to me but thanks for realising that it was hd0, I never would have tried it.

It's a well-known Windows problem. It expects (requires really) to be first on a disk even in a multi-disk system if I remember right. Once GRUB knows this it can fool Windows.