In an effort to continue evaluating and reviewing different Open Source Operating Systems, I downloaded and installed OpenSolaris 2008.05 onto the test partition of my notebook.  FAIL

It was rather late in the evening and I was tired, so when I installed it, I forgot to keep an eye out for the grub options during the install.  This means that when I ejected the CD and rebooted, all I got was the grub menu list from OpenSolaris, I had no way of getting back into my Ubuntu installation :-(

Google is your friend, and I found this....

http://www.sorgonet.com/linux/grubrestore/

Worked a charm! and I was back up and running in no time, a short summary follows:

From the OpenSolaris grub menu presented to me, I hit "c" to enter the grub command line interface.  I know my Ubuntu was installed in (hd0,1) and so entered root (hd0,1) and the did setup (hd0) which reinstalled my Ubuntu grub on the master boot record of my harddrive - easy as pie!

If you are stuck without a grub menu (ie you had to reinstall Windows on your dual boot and it overwrote your grub install) you can use any live cd, open a terminal, type grub and continue from there.

Review of OpenSolaris will be up some time next week once I've had a chance to tinker.

Installed Hardy on the cluster manager node this morning, all of which went smoothly up until the restart - the grub bootloader fired up, and promptly gave an "Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition". Drat.

Now, this machine has a rather curious drive setup. The main hard drive, i.e. the one I'd installed the Ubuntu OS to, is on the first SATA IDE channel. It has two additional IDE drives - a second hard drive for data storage, and a DVDRW optical, both PATA, running on the machine's only PATA IDE controller.

What happens (according to The Mighty Google) is that grub gets a little confused when it sees a mixture of SATA and PATA hard drives in the same box. As best I can understand it, grub prioritises PATA IDE when it is being installed (so it sees your first PATA drives as hd0) and SATA devices get bumped down the list. However, when grub actually runs, it sees the drive it is running on as hd0 no matter what it might have thought during the install process - so you end up with a mismatch in drive identifiers in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

The quick solution that worked for me was to read and implement Guardian-Mage's post from this forum thread:

http://www.techsupportforum.com/alternative-computing/linux-support/2018...

By the way, Hardy runs like a dream on the quad-core cluster boxes :)