(Re)create grub option from live CD doesn't include menu entries for other linux distros on HD
Posts: 21
Greetings,
one of the several things I immediately liked with Mepis was the idea that the LiveCD not only serves as a device to test the Mepis distribution and to install it, but also, after installation, to repair it.
So, after installing a MS Windows partition, I wanted to uses the "reinstall GRUB Bootloader" feature in the "mepis config (OS center)" tool to get my GRUB MBR back working.
The result was nice, but far from perfect:
I now have a grub menu, with Mepis, Windows and the option to test my computer's RAM, but all partitions with other Linux distribution (which were included in my former xandros Grub menu) are now gone.
Couldn't Mepis scan the partitions for other Linux distributions and insert
the name of their partition in the GRUB menu? Xandros does this, for example
(so I now recreatd the grub menu with Xandros, but the Mepis grub menu is visualy nicer otherwise and anyway it would be great if Mepis could be as good as Xandros in this option)
[Sidenote on Xandros: the main reason that made me *not* using Xandros was that they seem to want to restrict their users to their own, very limited, repository of "the xandros network" - not very open! They even do not include kpackage or synaptics or similar to work around this and when you would figure out how to use it despite of them trying to make it hard for you, you would always risk to break sonething anyway)]
I guess that the same issue will also apply to new installations of Mepis from the LiveCD on systems with other Linux distros allready installed.
It would be nice if someone could take care of this for one of the next versions of Mepis.
(Yes, it may be possible to work around this manually, but the whole point of that "reinstall GRUB Bootloader" option, as far as I understand, is to make the whole process easier and more failure safe and so mainking things simpler for newbies like me, right?)
Thanx
Kai
Install Methods Do That
Posts: 5513
Kai, from my recollection, all Linux distros that I've played with do not install all partitions into grub. Most installation techniques are intended for "simple systems": your system has Windows and you are installing one distribution of Linux. As soon as you have more than one distro and/or Windows, you have stepped out of the "simple" category 
Grub is amazingly complicated (if you choose to use lots of options). However, the way Mepis and other distros do it is to see whether you have Windows, saves that info, and puts Mepis or some other distro in to run.
If you want to have multiple kernels, multiple Windows, multiple Linuxes, well, you need to obtain the information from each of the distributions and put the into the "main" version of grub (the one that's actually booting the system.
If you don't like that technique, you can use some of the other commercial boot loaders. One of my favorites that I haven't seen mentioned on this site so I'll give them a plug (grin) is Acronis. I'm sure others will give their own recommendations if you are interested.
These types of boot loaders are completely independent of any OS on the system. Acronis, like V Com's Boot Manager, make a separate partition in which they put their boot info for all the OSes on the system.
Jon
grub
Posts: 292
Hi
I think you can make copy of you xandros grub menu.lst. After reinstalling mepis grub you can insert other linux distributions to your
new menu.lst.