From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030819 Description of problem: I have a laptop that was cleanly installed with a taroon beta, laid out thusly: hda1 = /boot (the boot partition for RHEL WS) hda2 = /home (user data) hda3 = /fedora (partition anticipating a fedora install) hda5 = / (the root filesystem for RHEL WS) hda6 = /swap I just installed Fedora Core 1, selecting manual partitioning and hda3 as the default partition. It came to pass that the installer told me, in effect, "I'm about to create a boot record for you, do you want me to write that to disk and make it your default or add other boot rules?" I used "Add" to create a new boot rule, and somehow found the old rule from WS (I don't remember if anaconda simply did a grub find across all partitions and give me options, or if I told it to look in /dev/hda1). In any event, I renamed that as "RHEL WS", made it the default, and then let the installer proceed to create a grub.conf file with both a Fedora boot and RHEL boot option. The installation finished and it was time to reboot. When I tried to reboot using RHEL WS, it failed, unable to find the proper file listed as /boot/vmlinuz-mumble-WS (presumably looking at (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinuz-mumble-WS when it should have been looking at (hd0,0)/vmlinuz-mumble-WS or some such). I ultimately got this debugged with Chris Kloiber's help, but it looks like going from a default single-boot system to a dual boot (where the second boot environment is entirely within one partition) ain't quite right. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: 1. Partition with hda1=/boot, hda3=/fedora, hda5=/, hda6=/swap 2. Install RHEL-WS cleanly on a laptop to hda1 and hda5 3. Install Fedora-Core to hda3 4. When given a choice about boot records, keep the fedora default, but use the menu to "add" the existing RHEL-WS boot info, and see if there's not a problem with a dangling/misdirected reference. Actual Results: Can boot Fedora, cannot boot RHEL WS without editing/fixing grub.conf Expected Results: Should be able to boot either system w/o any additional intervention. Additional info:
If you want to support multiple Linux installations like this, you need to install the boot loader to the partition in the advanced boot loader options screen and then you can chainload the different GRUBs (and add the various boot partitions from anaconda). You can also use the same /boot partition and choose not to install a boot loader at all and then grubby ends up doing the right thing as the kernel package gets installed. Doing anything else has far too many variables that really can't be just magically determined.