Arch Linux

jamiethemorris

Member

Registered: 2012-08-17

Posts: 8

Triple-Boot troubles on Dell Mini 10v

Hello everyone, I'm having a hell of a time getting Arch installed on my Mini 10v. The problem is that the chameleon boot loader sees OSX and Windows just fine, but refuses to Arch no matter what I do. This is a common occurrence in this situation and the solution is usually simple... However the normal solutions are not working.
Normally, force-installing GRUB2 to the root partition that Linux is installed on, rather than the MBR, allows it to be booted from chameleon. This worked fine with Ubuntu-based distros whether I was using ext2, ext3, or ext4.

Here is what I've tried:
-Installing grub to ext4 partition (flagged as boot)
-repartitioning it and added 200mb ext2 partition, then tried to install grub to that (gave me strange errors trying to install grub... Didn't expect this to work anyway.)
-erasing the Arch install and using ext3 as the partition for GRUB2 (some say chameleon does not support ext4)
-disabling journaling to convert ext3 to ext2 (some also say chameleon does not support ext3)

No dice. I have now created from scratch a 200 mb ext2 partition flagged as boot, a 20gb root partition as ext4, and a 37 gb partition as ext4. I checked to see if chameleon was seeing the partition before installing... Still no luck. I don't think I'm doing the install wrong, because I installed Arch on my hackintosh desktop and the install was totally painless. However, I have no way of knowing because I can't boot into it at all.

I'm hesitant to go forth with doing the install again because I'm afraid it will be a waste of time... But my short experience with Arch on my desktop hack has made me want to install it on everything.

Should I just stop trying and go back to Ubuntu on this machine? I really want Arch on it, please help.

jamiethemorris

Member

Registered: 2012-08-17

Posts: 8

Re: Triple-Boot troubles on Dell Mini 10v

Just tried it again... partition list as follows:
sda1: 210mb EFI, formatted as fat32, flagged as boot
sda2: 450gb OS X partition, formatted as HFS+
sda3: 239gb Windows partition, formatted as NTFS
sda4: 105mb ext2 /boot partition, type is set to EF00, flagged as boot
sda5: 21gb ext4 root partition, type set to 8300
sda6: 39.3gb ext4 home partition, type set to 8300

still not showing up.