Grub Issues ; Prominent.

I have not switched to lilo yet but it might happen.

Grub will only boot a different O.S than the one that installed it if it is chainloaded. If you manually add a O.S entry in the menu.lst file all that happens is the Title ends up in the boot screen text. Error 17 is displayed after trying to boot.

Grub will not boot ANY O.S manually using the grub shell.

I'm not using a volume to boot from.

                             Any ideas? :wall:

                             Thanks in advance!

Well.. that's not true. You only need to chainload when you need to call up a different boot loader other than grub (e.g. a windows boot loader). So.. grub CAN boot OS's from the grub shell... and if needed it can transfer control to a foreign boot loader as needed.

I think maybe we need to know a LOT more about your setup before we can know what exactly is wrong.

Mandriva ,Fedora and CentOS need the "root=/dev/sda1" argument in the kernel command and also the "initrd /boot/init..." is needed.

So

In the grub prompt from tapping c in the grub menu while booting ,

root (hd0,0)

kernel /boot/kernel_name root=/dev/sda1 in non grub terms because it is for the kernel ,

initrd /boot/init..... and finally

boot 'press enter'

If I copy and paste an added O.S to a previously installed Linux menu.lst file the later O.S will not boot. Any suggestions?

If I copy and paste an added O.S to a previously installed Linux menu.lst file the later O.S will not boot. Any suggestions?

Probably because the added OS is on a different disk or partition.

Agreed... never blindly copy data from config files -- always understand its meaning first.

theKbStockpiler: It'd really help if you could post the entire file, as well as which entries do and don't work, so we don't have to guess.