Can't figure out how to get Mandriva grub bootloader to recognize Ubuntu and display it as an option?
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.
hawklord2010-09-27T16:47:15Z
Favorite Answer
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
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.