How can I make Grub recognise my old Linux Partition

How can I make Grub recognise my old Linux Partition "Problem: I have two partitions. On one I have installed Fedora 9 and on my other partition I just installed Fedora 12. Now that I've installed Fedora 12 I can't get Grub to boot the old partition. How can I configure Grub to boot to my old fedora partition?"
Asked by: Guest \| Views: 273

Total answers/comments: 1

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bert [Entry]

"LVM isn't ""Linux Virtual Machine"", it's ""Logical Volume Manager"". If I understand LVM correctly, to boot to a root partition on LVM, you need a separate /boot partition outside of the LVM (was that the small partition on /dev/sda2?). Your system may still have this, but if your FC12 installation overwrote it, recovery will be much more difficult.

Here's a couple of links to Grub vs LVM problems: link 1, link 2

Also see ""Mounting a Linux LVM volume"" -- you should be able to verify that your old FC9 system is still OK by mounting and examining its root partition while booted into FC12. If so, you can probably recover fairly easily, even if you've overwritten the FC9 /boot partition.

Here's an example Grub boot entry for an LVM system (source). In this case, (hd0,0) (meaning /dev/sda1) is a small /boot partition, and the rest of the system resides on an LVM on /dev/sda2. Note the root= and lvm2root= entries on the kernel line:

title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.26 Using LVM with SATA Disk
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.26 root=/dev/ram0 lvm2root=/dev/mapper/sda_vol-root
initrd /initrd-lvm2-2.6.26.gz

Postmortem: This user ended up with the best-case scenario. The FC12 installation didn't overwrite or reformat FC9's /boot partition, /dev/sda2, and all that was needed was to access FC9's old /boot/grub/menu.lst and copy the boot entries into FC12's Grub menu."