[wellylug] Grub issues

[Lyndsay Mountfort]

A friend has a fresh installation of Mepis 3.1. He's got interesting
issues with Grub. Any help would be much appreciated.

Partitioning is:

2 hard drives

- hda2 contains his current WinXP installation

- hda6 contains Mepis

- hdb1 contains an older WinXP installation - kept until he's sure he's
got everything he wants off it -still bootable before installation of
Mepis if replugged as first hard drive

- hdb5 is another NTFS partition, user data only

/boot/grub/menu.lst looks like this:

===========================

timeout 15
color cyan/blue white/blue
foreground ffffff
background 0639a1
gfxmenu /boot/grub/message

title MEPIS at hda6, kernel 2.6.10
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.10 root=/dev/hda6 nomce quiet
splash=verbose vga=791
initrd (hd0,5)/boot/initrd.splash

title Windows at hda2
rootnoverify (hd0,-2)
chainloader +1

title Windows at hdb1
rootnoverify (hd1,-3) find no explanation of
chainloader +1

title Windows at hdb5
rootnoverify (hd1,2)
chainloader +1

title MEMTEST
kernel /boot/memtest86.bin

==========================

Now the weird bit:

- Mepis boots just fine.

- Selecting second entry above (new windows installation, hda2) fails to
boot

- Selecting third entry above (old windows installation, hdb1) fails to boot

- Selecting entry four above, hdb5, which has no operating system,
actually boots the windows installation on hda2

I have looked at the Grub documentation, but can't find anything that
might suggest what is going on. (Also can find no explanation of the
minus signs in the partition naming, which would be interesting.) In
fact we could work around it by simply renaming the entries above, but
it's a dirty fix, and doesn't contribute at all to my understanding or his.

Also it would be nice to allow booting of the older windows if possible,
although I'm not sure whether that's possible with it on the second drive??

Disclaimer: I haven't examined this machine myself, so am taking his
word for it about what is on what partition. But the auto-generated
menu.lst file above supports his reportage.

Lyndsay