Arch Linux

E.T.Se

Member

Registered: 2009-12-28

Posts: 5

[SOLVED] Dual boot and GRUB woes

I want a dual boot system with Arch and Windows running on the same disk. My partition table looks like this:

hda1 = Windows XP, ntfs, 7,7 GB (boot)
hda2 = /, ext3, ~7,2 GB
hda5 = swap, 500 MB
hda6 = /home, ~13 GB

(The drive is only 30 GB in total, it's an old laptop.)

My problem is that after installation, GRUB always fails to load. This last time I reinstalled Windows, reformatted the rest of the partitions, installed Arch, and put GRUB on the / partition (hda2). Result: no GRUB, Windows is loaded directly.

My questions are:

- Would it help to install GRUB on a separate /boot partition?
- Which of the partitions are supposed to be bootable, primary and secondary?
- What if I install GRUB on the MBR instead? Wouldn't that cause the Windows bootloader to fail?
- Am I even asking the right questions? (If not, how would you do this?)

I'm not a complete beginner but I think I need some help here.

Last edited by E.T.Se (2009-12-30 20:20:39)

graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,670

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Re: [SOLVED] Dual boot and GRUB woes

Put grub on the MBR and make an entry in the menu.lst for WIndows.  Easy.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gru … th_Windows

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E.T.Se

Member

Registered: 2009-12-28

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] Dual boot and GRUB woes

It worked, thanks! I had tried it before of course but forgotten to uncomment the Windows part in menu.lst. Where's the wallbanger smiley when you need it?

Anyway, now I have another problem, possibly more serious. When I try to boot into Arch, it gives me an error:

FILESYSTEM CHECK FAILED

/dev/hda2 The superblock could not be read.

Then it mounts the disks as read-only and lets me choose between entering a maintenance shell or reboot.

I've tried issuing the command it recommends, "e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/sda2" (as the partition now seems to be called), but it doesn't help. I've also tried "e2fsck -p /dev/sda2" as someone recommended in another thread, but the problem persists.

Any more ideas?

jdarnold

Member

From: Medford MA USA

Registered: 2009-12-15

Posts: 485

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Dual boot and GRUB woes

Can you post your /etc/fstab?

E.T.Se

Member

Registered: 2009-12-28

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] Dual boot and GRUB woes

It looks like this:

#
# /etc/fstab: static file system information
#
# <file system>                     <dir>                 <type>                <options>      <dump>   <pass>
devpts                              /dev/pts               devpts                  defaults      0         0
shm                                 /dev/shm               tmpfs                   nodev,nosuid  0         0

#/dev/cdrom                         /media/cd         auto          ro,user,noauto,unhide       0         0
#/dev/dvd                           /media/dvd        auto          ro,user,noauto,unhide       0         0
#/dev/fd0                           /media/fl         auto          user,noauto                 0         0

/dev/hda2 / ext3 defaults 0 1
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 /home / defaults 0 1

jdarnold

Member

From: Medford MA USA

Registered: 2009-12-15

Posts: 485

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Dual boot and GRUB woes

Not sure, but a couple things:

1] Have you tried booting a live disk to run the fsck?

2] You could try using UID= instead of /dev/hda in the fstab. I was having a similar problem if my partition booted in the wrong order, which went away when I used UID. The blkd command will tell you the UUID of a drive. Then, instead of /dev/hda2, you would put in UUID=

# blkid
/dev/sdb4: UUID="303889b7-ae78-436f-85ac-da95b2280596" TYPE="ext3"

So it would be:

UUID="303889b7-ae78-436f-85ac-da95b2280596" / ext3 defaults 0 1

E.T.Se

Member

Registered: 2009-12-28

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] Dual boot and GRUB woes

Surprisingly, the UUID trick worked. Thank you very much!

I'm doing the rest of the install process now. I'll let you know if I bump into any more problems that I can't solve by myself.

jdarnold

Member

From: Medford MA USA

Registered: 2009-12-15

Posts: 485

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Dual boot and GRUB woes

Good to hear! You should change the topic to [solved] in that case.

E.T.Se

Member

Registered: 2009-12-28

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] Dual boot and GRUB woes

All right! Everything worked out fine in the end. Typing this now from my new Arch Linux setup. Really impressed by the community so far. Thanks a lot!