[SOLVED] GRUB Dual-boot not working at all (non-UEFI PC)

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1

UPD: My issue was fixed. If you’re searching for a solution and you’re in the same situation as I was in, read the Original post and 3 replies after that (by alpopa and me). If it doesn’t help in your situation, try other solutions people suggested. Good luck!

Original post

Hello.

I tried to do everything as in alpopa’s guide on Dual-booting, but got completely no luck.

I have a BIOS (MBR) system. There will be some details about it later, but the fact that it isn’t UEFI is the most important one for now. Also, I have Xubuntu installed as my main system. Now let’s list my steps:

First-of-all, I did sudo grub-install --force /dev/sda3 (khallebal wrote that I need to do it in case of an ext2 error I got). /dev/sda3 was (and is) my Linux partition. Then I rebooted my PC just to make sure it even boots. Got no GRUB menu but I thought it’s fine.
Then I read “After this step, boot to Haiku and (re)install BootManager. No configuration is necessary.” in the guide and decided to install my Haiku now.
I partitioned my SSD via GParted LiveUSB: shrank /dev/sda3 (linux partition) to it’s size minus 50gb, and then allocated an ext4 partition on these unallocated 50gb. It got the /dev/sda4 mark.
Booted to my Haiku USB, started installing, formatted /dev/sda4 to BeFS and installed Haiku on it. Then I tried rebooting and got into my Xubuntu on boot again. Wasn’t a big surprise for me and I decided to move from Using Haiku’s BootManager section to the Using GRUB. Maybe it was a mistake.
I added all needed lines to the /etc/grub.d/40_custom, but then noticed that it had no Xubuntu section in it. I thought that it’s fine and the GRUB will just boot me into Haiku or show only one menu entry. That’s what my 40_custom looked like after the change:

#!/bin/sh
exec tail -n +3 $0
# This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries.  Simply type the
# menu entries you want to add after this comment.  Be careful not to change
# the 'exec tail' line above:
menuentry Haiku {
set root=(hd0,4) # 0 = first disk, 4 = 4th partition, the Haiku partition
chainloader +1
}

As you can see, I changed the root=(hdX,Y) option because my Haiku is on /dev/sda4.

Then I ran update-grub and noticed that it actually found linux initrd images and other stuff while updating. Decided to ignore that and not even copy it, and just reboot. As result I booted into Xubuntu again, without any GRUB menu and not even into the Haiku itself.

What did I do wrong? And on which step?

Thanks.

update-grub log (recreated by running update-grub again, may be a little different than the one I got on the first time?):

Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub'
Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub.d/init-select.cfg'
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.15.0-56-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.15.0-56-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.15.0-53-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.15.0-53-generic
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.elf
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
Warning: os-prober will not be executed to detect other bootable partitions.
Systems on them will not be added to the GRUB boot configuration.
Check GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER documentation entry.
done

inxi -Fxxxz output:

System:
  Kernel: 5.15.0-56-generic x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 11.3.0
    Desktop: Xfce 4.16.0 tk: Gtk 3.24.23 info: xfce4-panel wm: xfwm 4.16.1
    vt: 7 dm: LightDM 1.30.0 Distro: Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)
Machine:
  Type: Desktop Mobo: ASRock model: A780LM-S serial: <superuser required>
    BIOS: American Megatrends v: P1.30 date: 05/07/2010
CPU:
  Info: quad core model: AMD Athlon II X4 640 bits: 64 type: MCP
    smt: <unsupported> arch: K10 rev: 3 cache: L1: 512 KiB L2: 2 MiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 800 min/max: 800/3000 boost: disabled cores: 1: 800
    2: 800 3: 800 4: 800 bogomips: 23948
  Flags: ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4a svm
Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA GT218 [GeForce 210] vendor: Micro-Star MSI N210 Geforce
    driver: nvidia v: 340.108 pcie: speed: 5 GT/s lanes: 8 bus-ID: 01:00.0
    chip-ID: 10de:0a65 class-ID: 0300
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.3 compositor: xfwm v: 4.16.1 driver:
    X: loaded: nvidia gpu: nvidia display-ID: :0.0 screens: 1
  Screen-1: 0 s-res: 1280x1024 s-dpi: 96 s-size: 339x271mm (13.3x10.7")
    s-diag: 434mm (17.1")
  Monitor-1: VGA-0 res: 1280x1024 hz: 60 dpi: 96
    size: 338x270mm (13.3x10.6") diag: 433mm (17")
  OpenGL: renderer: GeForce 210/PCIe/SSE2 v: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 340.108
    direct render: Yes
Audio:
  Device-1: AMD SBx00 Azalia vendor: ASRock driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel
    bus-ID: 00:14.2 chip-ID: 1002:4383 class-ID: 0403
  Device-2: NVIDIA High Definition Audio
    vendor: Micro-Star MSI N210 Geforce 210 PCIe driver: snd_hda_intel
    v: kernel pcie: speed: 5 GT/s lanes: 8 bus-ID: 01:00.1 chip-ID: 10de:0be3
    class-ID: 0403
  Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.15.0-56-generic running: yes
  Sound Server-2: PulseAudio v: 15.99.1 running: yes
  Sound Server-3: PipeWire v: 0.3.48 running: yes
Network:
  Device-1: Realtek RTL810xE PCI Express Fast Ethernet vendor: ASRock
    driver: r8169 v: kernel pcie: speed: 2.5 GT/s lanes: 1 port: e800
    bus-ID: 02:00.0 chip-ID: 10ec:8136 class-ID: 0200
  IF: enp2s0 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full mac: <filter>
  IF-ID-1: virbr0 state: down mac: <filter>
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 223.58 GiB used: 53.33 GiB (23.9%)
  ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Western Digital model: WDS240G2G0A-00JH30
    size: 223.58 GiB speed: 3.0 Gb/s type: SSD serial: <filter> rev: 0000
    scheme: MBR
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 162.05 GiB used: 53.32 GiB (32.9%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda3
  ID-2: /boot/efi size: 240.2 MiB used: 5.2 MiB (2.2%) fs: vfat
    dev: /dev/sda2
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: partition size: 7.63 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) priority: -2
    dev: /dev/sda1
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 27.5 C mobo: N/A gpu: nvidia temp: 47 C
  Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A
Info:
  Processes: 198 Uptime: 4m wakeups: 0 Memory: 3.83 GiB used: 1.2 GiB (31.3%)
  Init: systemd v: 249 runlevel: 5 Compilers: gcc: 11.3.0 alt: 11/12
  Packages: apt: 2809 Shell: Bash v: 5.1.16 running-in: xfce4-terminal
  inxi: 3.3.13

My partitioning scheme:

image
image789×539 51.4 KB

BTW, Xubuntu sees that Haiku partition (screenshot from my desktop):
image

- I’ll add more info if needed

2

Hi @rudzik8.

Linux update-grub uses configuration from /etc/default/grub file (IIRC). One of configuration values is TIMESTAMP TIMEOUT (or something similar). There are some special constants for it to boot immediately and to even not show the boot menu. But any positive number means the timeout in seconds until the selected menu item will boot. So, as a first step you may want to increase TIMEOUT=30 to wait 30 seconds.

Second, from within GRUB you can press C to enter the command line. You can enter interactively all the same commands as you use in /boot/grub/grub.cfg or /etc/grub.d/40_custom between { and }. Additionally, you can use autocomplete by pressing TAB. So, in GRUB command line you can issue:

set root=(hd0,<TAB>

GRUB will list all partitions it detects. Identify the Haiku’s one and continue:

set root=(hd0,msdos4)
chaniloader +1
boot

If Haiku boots this way, reboot to Linux and add exactly all the above (except boot) to /etc/grub.d/40_custom file:

menuentry Haiku {
  set root=(hd0,msdos4)
  chainloader +1
}

After that run again sudo update-grub. After these steps I hope you can boot Haiku from GRUB.

3

Thanks for your detailed reply, but I got stuck with GRUB_TIMEOUT=30. Before that it was =0. GRUB clearly waited these 30 seconds, and I tried pressing C but got nothing. It was just black screen without underline cursor. Then it just started loading the Xubuntu.

In other words:
I changed the /etc/default/grub file (changed the TIMEOUT value), ran sudo update-grub and rebooted my PC. No luck.

My current /etc/default/grub file:

# If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update
# /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
# For full documentation of the options in this file, see:
#   info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration'

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden
GRUB_TIMEOUT=30
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

# Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs
# This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains
# the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...)
#GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef"

# Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only)
#GRUB_TERMINAL=console

# The resolution used on graphical terminal
# note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE
# you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo'
#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480

# Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true

# Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries
#GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"

# Uncomment to get a beep at grub start
#GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1"
4

Okay, now I think I’m superdumb.
Everything I needed was to check the manuals, info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration'.
Everything I needed was to just press [Shift] on the GRUB stage. It showed the menu with “Ubuntu” and “Haiku” entries (if not counting some memory test entries). Looks like I just need to change the TIMEOUT_STYLE from =hidden to =menu.

Thank you, alpopa! You gave me somewhat wrong instructions but doing them got me into reading manual and doing everything correctly.

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5

You can use Haiku boot manager installed on MBR and per-OS boot loaders installed on PBRs (partition boot record).

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6

When i gave you that solution i assumed you knew what you where doing and that what you wanted is to install grub to the linux partition, but now it seems all you want is to install grub as your main bootmanager, in that case don’t use /dev/sda3 but use the whole drive instead i.e /dev/sda then you can add the haiku partition to the grub menu using either a text editor (there is plenty of info on how to do that) or install the grub-customizer app to do it with the gui (much simpler), i hope this will help.

7

Oops, forgot to update the main post. I already fixed this issue, there’s no need to reply. Thanks!

1 Like
8

Yes i know that you already fixed it, but these replies are also meant as references for future users. :smile:

1 Like