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Uber-Noobs attempt to dual boot Ubuntu & OSX on MSI Wind


ScrappyDDZ
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Thank you for reading, hopefully one of you bright folks might be able to shed some light on my plight.

 

I have an MSI Wind U100, It runs Ubuntu 9.10 wonderfully, and thanks to msiwindosx.iso, it can also run OS X 10.5 quite well! Either or works great. But for the life of me I absolutely can not get a dual boot menu to give me two functioning options.

 

This is what I have so far, seems the most promising of everything I've tried. my 160gb sataII drive has 2 partitions, OSX (installed first on the 2nd partition) and Ubuntu installed on the first after OSX. Naturally grub took over darwin when Ubuntu took over.

 

Grub sees the OSX partition and gives me a menu listing, but when selected it seems to bypass darwin completely and try booting OSX, resulting in a blank blue screen, which I see hdd activity and the machine will power down if I hit the power button and then enter. It will stay on the blue screen indefinantly.

 

Now, I can boot to the OSX installation disc and if I don't hit any buttons, it will boot my OSX partition, If do hit a button (sans F8) it will boot the OSX installation disc.

 

Furthermore, I can use the fdisk utility to set either the partition 1 or the partition 2 to be bootable and make either OS come up on its own.

 

I have gone over many many guides and havent found anything that has worked for me. I run in to things like permissions issues when trying to write certain files or directories, I am admin on both OS's.. like I said, Uber-Noob... I know just enough to get myself in to trouble apparently.

 

So in conclusion, I don't care of I boot darwin or grub, as long as one will allow me to access the other and more easily get to the OS of my choosing.

 

Thanks in advance for any assistance offered.

 

-Scrappy

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Have you tried installing Chameleon?  Set your OS X partition to active, boot into OS X, download the latest Chameleon install package (ask Google) and see how that goes.  

 

I base this advice off of the information that you can boot into either by setting the boot flag on the desired partition.  By installing Chameleon, you'll be creating a bootloader just like the one on the install disc (which succeeds).  Chameleon provides options to select the OS to boot when you press any key during the countdown... but you may need to configure the boot profile for Ubuntu in Chameleon after installing.  So keep your /boot/grub/menu.lst handy just incase.

 

Goodluck.

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Have you tried installing Chameleon? Set your OS X partition to active, boot into OS X, download the latest Chameleon install package (ask Google) and see how that goes.

 

 

...

 

 

Goodluck.

 

Ok, So I did that... and it boots my OSX no problem, not seeing my Ubuntu partition... google'n now to see how I can manually add it, i guess? or should it just see it?

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Ah, if you didn't install GRUB to the Ubuntu root, Chameleon probably won't recognize it.

 

If you installed GRUB to the MBR, then you'll need to install it to your Linux root...

 

 

Yes, I found that on google. And, being me, have found it easier said (and comprehended) than done. The majority of how-to's on the subject require you to sudo grub, which returnes a command not found for me when using the Ubuntu distro as instructed. So... yea. Guess I'll keep plugging away =)

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Ok, I installed Grub(2?) to my /dev/sda3 (Ubuntu 10.4 partition) I used the bootable Ubuntu 10.4 install disc to mount sda3 and use grub-install --force /dev/sda3 (or was it just sda3, I dont remember, but it said it completed with no errors after telling me it was a bad idea.

 

reboot and Chameleon sees both OSX & Linux, OSX boots flawlessly, Linux however gives me a: grub rescue> prompt.

 

Googling...

 

If anyone has any thoughts, suggestions... =)

 

 

 

-Scrappy

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---

update:

 

I seemed to have fixed "something" by booting to ubuntu live cd and using terminal to do a grub-install --force --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda3

 

 

drops me to a grub> prompt

 

I'll keep plugging away...

---

solved!

 

with :https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

 

Express Boot to the Most Recent Kernel

 

Command Summary *:

set root=(hdX,Y)

 

linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sdXY ro

 

initrd /initrd.img

 

boot

 

Expanded Instructions *:

 

Press ENTER after completing each line. Some entries will not provide feedback. This is normal.

If a "file not found" or similar error message is displayed while running these commands, ensure you are using the correct X,Y values. The ls command can help determine the correct values. Once the X,Y values are confirmed run the following command:

 

set prefix=(hdX,Y)/boot/grub

 

1*. set root=(hdX,Y)

Type with correct X,Y results from the ls command and press ENTER. Remember GRUB 2 counts the first drive as 0, the first partition as 1. Example: If the Ubuntu system is on sda5, enter: set root=(hd0,5)

2*. linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sdXY ro

Example: linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda3 ro

 

* Wubi users see note.

3. initrd /initrd.img

Selects the latest initrd image.

4. boot

Boot to the latest kernel on the selected partition.

* Wubi users only - substitute these commands in Steps 1 and 2:

 

set root=(loop0)

linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sdXY loop=/ubuntu/disks/root.disk ro

 

These changes are not permanent. After successfully booting into the system the user should run sudo update-grub and inspect the GRUB 2 configuration file (/boot//grub/grub.cfg). For problems with booting the main linux kernel, ensure the search, linux, and initrd lines in the [### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux ###] section of the file now correctly point to the correct locations. The user may need to reinstall GRUB 2 (sudo grub-install /dev/sdX).

 

AND THEN doing (below) AGAIN

 

booting to ubuntu live cd and using terminal to do a grub-install --force --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda3

 

and now I'm a dual booting happy person, after 3 days of eye strain and aggrevation!

 

I hope this info helps someone else.

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