Unable to boot F11 with multiple drives on system

[stan]

On Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:05:43 +0200
Mark Panen <mark.panen at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi
> 
> I was given the option to put my boot loader on sda1 amongst others
> even though F11 had chosen a PATA drive as default for grub. My other
> SATA drives where also shown.
> 
> Anyway i choose sda1 like it works with another OS and when i rebooted
> F11 after the install i came to the grub prompt.
> 
> The rescue function tells me /sbin/grub-install cannot be found when i
> ran grub-install /dev/sda
> 
> Any help please
> 
> Mark
> 
I'm not sure I understand the situation you are describing very well.
And not sure I could help even if I did. :-)

I would leave the mbr of the normal boot drive alone and put the boot
loader in the /boot partition of the new installation.  Then edit
the /boot/grub/menu.lst of the normal boot drive to have an entry
pointing to the new install boot partition (chainloader or configfile,
see man grub or info grub).  When you rebooted it would bring up the
first menu from which you would select the F11 entry and bring up the
menu for F11.

It sounds like you are booting from an mbr with no grub menu.lst.

Can you show the content of the /boot/grub/menu.lst on /dev/sda1 where
you actually installed the boot loader?
And the same thing on the PATA drive the installer wanted to select as
default.

Maybe someone else is able to understand what you are asking better
than me and will give explicit instructions.