[LUG] Slight problem with booting my laptop!

[Grant Sewell <dclug@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all.

Just a quick background to the problem:
Tuesday afternoon - "Operating Systems" class for Yr2 BTEC students: installing 
Linux systems.  There weren't enough decent (and functional) machines available for 
each group to do an installation, so one group installed Red Hat (9.0) onto my 
laptop onto hda2.  I supervised them so that they didn't wipe the Debian partitions 
(hda1 for /boot, and hda4 for /) that were already present.

Anyway, they installed it, it worked and everything was nice.  Except the fact that 
there was no entry for Debian in the bootloader (GRUB) menu.  Last night (quite 
late) I edited RedHat's menu.lst/grub.conf as follows:

default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,1)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.20-8)
       root (hd0,1)
       kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-8 ro root=LABEL=/1
       initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.20-8.img
title Debian                                    < I added these lines, obviously.
       root (hd0,3)                            < 
       kernel /vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda4       < 
       initrd /initrd.img                      < 

I then ran "grub-install /dev/hda".  It finished without errors, so I rebooted 
hoping to boot into Debian.... but it didn't work!

Now, when I boot the machine from the harddrive, I the "GRUB Read Error".

I have booted from both Knoppix and Debian Sarge Net Install CD, mounted the RedHat 
partition, chrooted and run the same thing again, all to no avail.
I have tried mounting the Debian partitions in their correct places, chrooting and 
running "grub-install /dev/hda" from there, but I then get the error "/dev/hda does 
not have any corresponding BIOS drive".

Any thoughts?

Cheers.

Grant.
-- 
Artificial intelligence is no match for nuratal stidutipy.

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