[conspire] Help with GRUB

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> First I burnt a CD for Kubuntu 9.10.  Very nice interface, but I spent
> a long time searching through the applications looking for a plain
> terminal window.  I did find a command line, but it only executes one
> command and closes.  Eventually I tried the command `xterm &`.  That
> opened a terminal window.  However, it doesn't have root privileges.
> Anyone know the root password for Kubuntu running off CD?

Just do "sudo /bin/bash" to start a root-privilege shell.  If you really
need direct login as root, then run "sudo passwd root" to set a
password.  *buntu variants are really big on discouraging direct use of
the root-user login, and making people get access to root privilege
using sudo.

> Next I tried SystemRescueCD.  It starts with a big caution note.  Do
> not attempt to mount directly to /.  Instead `mkdir /mnt/mydir` and
> mount files there.  Does grub care where it is in the file system when
> following Tony's suggestions?

When you say "grub", here, what specific thing are you asking about?

There's a program called /usr/sbin/grub, which writes bootable
information to locations specified in /boot/grub/menu.lst .
SystemRescueCD has that program in a useful place on its live-CD
system; you don't need to worry about _its_ location.  You just use it.

You'll want to grab your regular menu.lst out of /mnt/mydir/boot/grub
and copy it to /boot/grub (on the live system).  Review it to make sure
it's correct, then do the usual with grub-install, and so on.

> When grub attempts to start windows, it halts on an error for unknown
> partition 0x82.  I believe that 0x82 is LinuxSwap.

That is correct.

> When grub attempts to start Debian, it halts on unknown partition type
> 0x7.

According to information in /sbin/fdisk, partition type 7 is
"HPFS/NTFS", so that's presumably your MS-Windows main (only?)
filesystem.

Again, correct the references in menu.lst, then re-run grub-install.