have just installed Mandriva 2006 on my hdb all by itself and I have hda with fedora 5. Now I'm having trouble configuring my /boot/grub file to boot from hda to hdb, Need some help. here is my latest conf.

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0,0)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.6.16-1.2133_FC5)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.16-1.2133_FC5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.16-1.2133_FC5.img

title Fedora Core (2.6.16-1.2122_FC5)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.16-1.2122_FC5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.16-1.2122_FC5.img

title Mandriva Linux 2006
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

I believe you don't need to chainload for the boot process. So instead, your last entry would be something like:

title Mandriva
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-Mandriva
initrd /initrd-Mandriva

If you tried something like that and it failed, then I'm not sure what to do.

Thanks Mike, I'll try it out tonight and see if it works. BTW I tried to install Debian and could'nt get to install, It didn't recognize my video card which does work well with Fedora 5? How to you like Debian? Is it a hard distro to work with?

Good luck.

If you want a long drawn out explanation, ask. For now, I'll keep this short. I've used Slackware 9 and 10, Mepis, Fedora 4, Suse 8 and 10, and Kanotix.

I tried to install Debian potato (old stable version) and woody (current stable version) several times each, and every time one or two important pieces of hardware weren't configured correctly.

I didn't have much problems installing Slackware, Fedora, and Suse. But adding software packages was a pain with all of them.

Kanotix and Mepis are based on Debian, but much easier to install. I ran Mepis for a while, but when I tried to use the Debian package tool "apt" to upgrade from Mepis to Debian, it trashed everything and wouldn't boot. Kanotix seems much better to me - when I upgraded from Kanotix to the latest Debian sid (unstable version), everything worked fine.

I never tried the package tool on Slackware. In my humble opinion, Debian's "apt" tool is more convenient than the rpm-based tools on Fedora and Suse. Hopefully Debian will become easier to install in the future. I've heard that some of the other package tools out there are very good, like the "ports" system for FreeBSD or whatever it is that Gentoo uses. Maybe they're as good as apt or better, I don't know.