Grub: menu.lst wrong
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| grub (Ubuntu) |
Invalid
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
I have a new Toshiba Satellite laptop on which I had installed FreeDOS in the other primary partition (Toshiba's recovery partition) besides the one Vista occupies. Then I installed Ubuntu 9.04 (in its own logical partitions). The menu.lst that was set up automatically correctly recognizes the other 2 bootable OSs. However, it does not work correctly. The symptom when trying to boot Vista was the error, "autochk program not found - skipping AUTOCHECK", which occurs early (but not immediately) during the bootup. Initially, FreeDOS would boot. (It was the active partition when I installed Ubuntu.) I got Vista going again by booting up GParted from a live CD. I correctly set the active and hidden properties for the Vista partition, after which Vista would boot but then FreeDOS would no longer boot correctly.
I was able to fix the problem by adding, in menu.lst, a pair of hide/unhide commands for each of the relevant partitions. E.g., for FreeDOS on (hd0,3):
...
hide (hd0,1)
unhide (hd0,3)
makeactive
...
It appears that a hidden partition will not boot properly. I do not know why grub-update does not insert the hide/unhide commands; but it appears that something along these lines is required. I do not know of anything particularly unusual about my situation that would have caused this failure. (I am no expert on Grub, but I did read some of the FSF's documentation for it to learn about partition names and the hide/unhide commands.)
| Nicola Ferralis (feranick) wrote | #1 |
| affects: | ubuntu → grub (Ubuntu) |
| dino99 (9d9) wrote | #2 |
| Changed in grub (Ubuntu): | |
| status: | New → Invalid |
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