Booting with GRUB

[OliverH]

Okay, so here's my problem.

 

Hardware precursor:

Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro SLI

AMD x2-4200+

Seagate 320gb SATA

 

 

I recently reinstalled xp on a clean 3 partition SATA drive. No problems there. I then decided I wanted to install Linux as well. So I created an EXT3 partition using partition magic as a primary partitio

. I chose PCLinuxOS, booted the liveCD, installed to said partition, no problems

still. 

 

GRUB was installed and configured itself nicely, detecting XP and adding it to the boot menu. Works fine, I can boot to either OS. Great. I then decided I want to add OSX. So I initially tried to create another partition and install it there, no go. After some reading, I discovered the issues with the SATA drive on nForce4 chipsets. No biggie. I have a spare IDE (80gb) that I'll pop in. I did that, partitioned it as primary (in GParted in Linux), made it bootable, formatted it as FAT32 - as per many install guides. I booted into OSX and it detected the drive no problem. I installed to it... still no problem.

 

Here's the problem:

I can't seem to add this drive to menu.lst successfully for GRUB to boot to it. in menu.lst, my partitions are listed as hd(0,0) -> windows and hd(0,2) -> PCLOS. I try adding osx at hd(1,0) to no avail, using:

 

title osx

root hd(1,0)

makeactive

chainloader +1

(this list is not a copy/paste, but from memory; i've tried several variants to this, still no-go)

 

Now, when I go into GParted, it shows this drive as having a 200mb FAT32 partition(??) at the beginning of the drive at hd(1,0) and the HFS+ partition at hd(1,1). I then have unused space of about 180mb at the end. What's up with that?

 

FYI, the error GRUB always gives me is error 13: Invalid or unsupported executable format

 

I'm pretty much lost at this point, so any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

Oliver

[alfdog]

no offense, but you'll probably get a better answer on the ubuntu forums

 

good luck

alf

[cbmkgd]

Since it concerns osx, this place is as good as any other.

 

You might try:

 

title osx
root (hd1,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1

or

title osx
root (hd1,1)
makeactive
chainloader --force +1

 

or even try to replace root with rootnoverify.

But not that it's (hdx,y), not hd(x,y).

 

As to why gparted did what it did, don't know.

[WaldMeister]

title osx
root (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1

 

That is if OS X is on the second partition.

[OliverH]

Thanks for the responses. I've tried with 1,1 and still no go, but I haven't tried it with --force, which I'll try tonight. The strange thing is, it doesn't seem to be gparted that is doing the 200mb/main partition/180mb leftover thing - it looks to be disk utility in the OSX install. I initially partititoned it in Windows (the first time I tried) and then in GParted, both times as FAT32. I then went into DU in the install and cleared the whole drive and re-formatted it as HFS+. Anyway, I'm not sure that this is a problem.

 

I did some searching and my problem seems identical to this one: http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?sho...305&hl=grub. The only difference is that he has the issue with it being installed on several partitions on the one drive whereas I have xp/linux on one drive and osx on it's own on a second drive, with a single primary partition. As I *really* don't want to go through the hassle of reinstalling xp & linux (both are working fine) I may just call it quits on this experiment.

 

Any suggestions re: Acronis OS selector or GAG? Thanks again,

 

Oliver