From: invalid@invalid.invalid   
      
   As mentioned in recent separate threads, I temporarily installed a second   
   distro on my box to test and play with. I tried to do so in such a way   
   that it would not affect my production distro, but what in fact happened   
   was that the new bootloader would not boot the production distro.   
   Specifically, here's what I did:   
      
   My daily driver distro has been mdv2010.0/1/2 x32 since 2010.0 was   
   released, set up thus:   
      
   Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Mounted on   
   /dev/sda1     ext4    7.7G  4.5G 61% /   
   /dev/sda8     ext4    139G   63G 53% /home   
   /dev/sda5     ext4    2.1G  173M  9% /opt   
   none         tmpfs    496M  3.1M  1% /tmp   
   /dev/sda6     ext4    2.1G  435M 23% /var/www   
      
   I insured that /boot/grub/menu.lst was recoverable from my normal backups,   
   and just to be sure I burned all of /boot to a CD. /boot does not have its   
   own partition; it's in the / partition. mdv2010.2 uses grub 0.97. Grub   
   1.96 is available in contrib, but I'm not using it.   
      
   Using gparted on a live distro, I shrunk /home by 10G and created a new   
   ext4 partition there for testing new distros. Then I installed CrunchBang   
   10 x64, putting everything save swap into the new partition. Swap is   
   shared with mdv2010.2, which I understand is no problem so long as I do   
   not hibernate or suspend either distro. CrunchBang's installer detected my   
   existing distro and offered to add it to grub, which I accepted. All   
   entries in the preexisting grub were migrated into Crunchbang's grub 1.99   
   boot menu.   
      
   CrunchBang runs fine, but attempting to boot any imported boot menu item   
   fails with a kernel panic. Device naming changed between grub legacy and   
   grub 2, and I can boot into Mandriva if at the grub window I edit the   
   stanza, changing "initrd (hd0,0)" to "initrd (hd0,1)". Booting Mandriva is   
   delayed for 60 seconds while "waiting for device sda1" and sda7 appear on   
   screen.   
      
   These minor boot hiccups don't bother me. I plan to replace my production   
   distro once I test the other distros on my list, and I take it for granted   
   that on any new distro I'll be tweaking the bootloader and a whole lot   
   more besides. What does worry me is that my whole strategy of testing   
   distros without putting my production distro at risk is obviously flawed.   
   What should I do differently the next time I install a distro for testing?   
      
   --   
   Warren Post   
   http://my.opera.com/wpost/   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)