Hi All I've had a difficult time these past couple of days. Because I installed more than one distribution on a disk. Thus I'll note my observations here so that others don't have the same difficulties I've had finding solutions. Ubuntu Hardy does not observe the bios settings on machines with IDE and SATA drives. Difficulties occur if the SATA disk is set as the primary active bootable disk. Ubuntu Hardy puts the IDE as /dev/sda and the SATA as /dev/sdb. When you boot the machine having gone through the 7 steps of the install process. If they are booted according to the bios configuration problems occur. Because the order of the drives are different to that of the installation environment. The problem is that Ubuntu and Fedora are using the UUID definitions in /etc/fstab. Which make it very difficult to trace where the problems are to be found. The Ubuntu forums talk of a utility called vol_id buts that's not any use when you need some kind of rescue disk to regain access to the machine and drives. The fix is to use blkid, see man blkid for details. Without any arguments blkid will print to stdout volume ID's on the system. Which can be cross referenced with the /etc/fstab. It might also be necessary to reinstall grub but not from the Ubuntu CD because of this drive organisation problem. The subject of UUID can be found on the Fedora and Ubuntu forums. Many contributors have complained about the ugliness of these 32 bit codes as partition identifiers. Any resizing or reorganisation of partitions will cause users problems if their distribution uses UUID as the partition identifiers. I missed the advanced button on the seventh step which reinstalled grub. So that's two reasons for thumbs down for Ubuntu. Therefore, anyone installing Ubuntu on a system with another existing distribution, ensure that you press the advanced button on the seventh step and select not to install a boot loader. Gena -- Gena http://www.ready2golinux.com M0EBP
