Fedora 17 installed on external HD but can't boot

[chris62]

Hi,

I have installed Fedora 17 on my external hard drive which already contained Ubuntu 12.04 and I was able to choose between the two distros. Since then my brother has installed Mint 13 and Centos 6.2 on the same hard drive so we had a choice of 4 Linux distros to boot.

After either Mint or Ubuntu were routinely updated I discovered that the boot menu no longer contained an entry for Fedora. Doing 'sudo update-grub' when booted into either Ubuntu or Mint shows that when the grub.cfg file is being created there is an entry for Fedora so I wondered if anyone could suggest why it doesn't appear in the boot menu and what I can do to make it.

If it helps to make the problem clearer, the disc is partitioned like this:

/dev/sda1 = Fedora 17
/dev/sda2 = Linux Swap
/dev/sda4 = Extended
/dev/sda5 = Ubuntu 12.04
/dev/sda6 = Linux Mint 13
/dev/sda7 = Centos 6.2

If anyone can help, I would be very grateful

[Yora0]

From what I know there can be only four primary partitions on any drive, so you probably have lots of extended partitions on it. Can you show the entire partioning scheme with all extended and logical partitions visible?

[chris62]

Thanks Yora0,

I have tried to include a screen shot of the output from Gparted showing the partition arrangement on the external drive, but although I have saved it on my desktop machine, I can't see a way of getting it into this reply.

However the primary partitions are /dev/sda1-3. /dev/sda3 is empty and is 1008 MB. /dev/sda4 is an extended partition containing partitions sda5-9. All are formatted to ext4.

I had a look at the FAQ for attaching files and followed the instructions but something went wrong and it hasn't worked

[chris62]

Hi again ora0,

I think it has wirked this time



http://forums.fedoraforum.org//forum...attach/png.gif

[chris62]

Hi again Yora0,

I think it has worked this time. I connected the drive to a different computer and what I described earlier as /dev/sda1 etc are now shoowing as /dev/sdc1-9



http://forums.fedoraforum.org//forum...attach/png.gif

[bigflopper2]

I wouldn't do that, installing 4 diff distros on the same hdd.

I'd recommend using vm virtualbox, no rebooting/grub probs after updates/partitioning prob. and you can run all distros at the same time.