Re: Sabayon 5.2_64 live disk installation.Brkn.Grub [Solved]

[onederer]

Thank you Penny. With your effort, my 32 bit question has been answered. Now we know that it wasn't our imaginations. I don't know if this problem affects everybody, but this is at least two people that's been prevented from getting to use SL5.2 32 or 64 bit.

Cheers!

[PennyRoyal]

IMO... It looks like grub has overwritten MBR. Windows is flaky in regards to anything messing with the MBR. If I were fixing this, I would let windows repair the MBR and then I would install grub on a partition of it's own and direct it to chainload the other 2 windows MBR. (The grub partition will need to be formatted fat16).

As far as sabayon 5.2... I think there is a hickup with the installer... I also think the devs will have a simple fix really soon...

Penny

[PennyRoyal]

onederer...
I don't know if this will help or confuse, but I modeled my system from this. Simply put, he is installing boot loader for each OS on it's own partition. He has grub installed on a partition of it's own with no OS. He activates grub to boot and chainloads to the other bootloaders to boot that OS. Very clean, very clever and very repairable if needed. You can setup the grub menu to load partitions that don't even have as OS installed yet! It will just error out and bounce you back to the menu for a different choice.

This post is a little dated... I believe the newer SATA drives will only allow 15 partitions...

Here is the layout of one of my systems:

(hd0) 698.64gb (Seagate 750gb)
hda1 C: 200.2gb Windows XP SP2 (fat32)
hda2 D: 200.2gb (ntfs)

hda3 GRUB 23.53mb (fat16)

hda4 298.22gb extended
hda5 1.99gb linux-swap
hda6 200.2gb Sabayon (ext3)
hda7 24.01gb (empty) linux (ext3)
hda8 24.01gb (empty) linux (ext3)
hda9 24.01gb (empty) linux (ext3)
hda10 24.01gb (empty) linux (ext3)

(hd1) 372.62gb (Seagate 400gb)
hdb1 E: 186.31gb Windows 7 Ultimate (ntfs)
hdb2 F: 186.30gb (ntfs)

The link:
http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?p=861282

Penny

[PennyRoyal]

Sorry about the last post... kinda got off topic...

Penny

[Fitzcarraldo]

^Don't apologise! It's very useful for readers to see these strategies for multi-boot installations.

[xanvincent]

I'd like to add I am having a similar problem.

Using x86 LiveDVD (from USB) Gnome. Was this on the Gnome and KDE versions or just Gnome?

5.1 works fine.

[onederer]

Well, I was just using KDE version. Made no incursion into Gnome, so I can't tell you. But my guess that the problem would be the same, since we are dealing with the Grub bootloader manager and/or the installation program. As it stands now, I take it to be a universal problem. You may try it with Gnome, and report back what your results were. If you can't also do anything with the Gnome version, then perhaps you should also created a bug report specific for Gnome.

Cheers!

P.S. I gave up and dumped Sabayon. I'm now writing this using PCLinuxOS. And I'm happy to report, with excellent results, and no errors.

[PennyRoyal]

All I use is KDE, so I didn't try Gnome.

I've been using sabayon as my distro of choice since version 3.4e. It has always worked for me OOTB. I hate the command line. If I can't 'point & click', I loose interest real fast. Being Gentoo based, there is a lot of command line stuff, BUT sabayon most always offers a GUI option to help me keep my stuff running and up to date. I've tried the other Linux flavors, including PClinusOS. It's nice... but it ain't no sabayon...

What I'm trying to say here is this... We have a problem with the switch to Grub2 or the installer. The sabayon OS hasn't all of a sudden gone down the toilet! The devs will fix it. Just like the devs for the other distros fix their problems when they happen. I can't give up on sabayon this early in it's 5.2 release...

Penny

[onederer]

Hi,

I'm interested to find out how long it will take to fix the problem. I mean that this problem is serious enough, and doesn't make the distro look good.

As far as loyalty, I go with the distro that currently works as advertised with as few bugs as possile. I like Sabayon, but not in it's current broken form. So I was forced to install one that runs well. It was not as critical this time, since the OS got installed in a desktop. No worry about wireless setup pains. But for the time being it will have to be PCLinuxOS.

I have a Sata hard drive that was ordered. It's supposed to arrive tomorrow. I will use in a USB toaster. This way I can try different OS's without upsetting the guts of the machine. Plug in the hard drive, install the OS, boot it up, and see the results. Many times, it gives me better results than trying a live distro. And should I get lucky to have more than one spare SATA hard drive handy, I can simply unplug the one in there, and replace it with the other hard drive, and try something else, or possibly backup my system(s) (1TB). Those toasters are real handy!

Cheers!

[xanvincent]

It's nice... but it ain't no sabayon...

Well said haha. I've been using sabayon since 3.5, but strictly gnome editions.

It seems this is strictly an installer / grub issue. Hopefully they release an update for the installer (isn't it supposed to be able to update itself from the LiveDVD?) and we won't have to wait till 5.3.

Back to Arch Linux for a while. I was looking forward to messing around with 5.2.