Re: Problems with dual boot and grub

Marc Schwartz wrote:

On Sun, 2004-03-21 at 19:56, Kenneth Becker wrote:

Marc Schwartz Wrote:

by following the instructions here:

http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/grub-w2k-HOWTO.html

Mark:
You da man. Worked the first time, no problems. So: We use the NT bootloader to start up Linux! Seems that we need something besides the basic Grub manual if Grub's going to do the heavy lifting itself.

Ken Becker

Ken,

I'm happy that it worked for you.  :-)

Understand that my own use of this particular approach is that I do not
want to overwrite the MBR. I need to essentially preserve the Windows
partition in as transparent a process as possible, since I lease my HW
and need to send it back to Dell when the lease expires.

Thus, I want to be able to both install and remove Linux as easily as
possible, without having to reinstall Windows and the associated
applications.

This problem with the MBR is easily handled with one of 2 ways.

1. boot to a dos/windows floppy and use "fdisk /mbr". This will rewrite the mbr and return it to the raw form that dos/windows (among other OSes) like for booting directly from the active partition.

2. before putting the linux boot loader on the mbr, save it with "dd if=/dev/<boot drive> of=MBR.saved bs=512 count=1" to create the image as it was befre installing, then when ready to restore it back use dd again to replace the original copy.

By using this approach, when time comes to send the HW back, I can
simply wipe Linux and resize the Windows NTFS partition back to its
original configuration using Partition Magic.

If I only had Linux on the system or I was willing to put GRUB on the
MBR, this approach would not be required. Then I would use GRUB to boot
Linux and/or the Windows partition as per typical procedures.

I found the above tutorial when I installed RH 8.0 on my older Dell
i8200 a couple of years back when dual-booting with XP at that time and
kept it around for RH 9 and now FC1 on my i5150. It is a pretty
straight-forward process. As I mentioned in a prior post, the key is to
remember that you need to recreate the boot sector file and copy it to
Windows if you should re-partition and/or resize any partitions on your
system.

I should also note that I do need to "force LBA" on both of my systems,
given where the Linux partition starts (ie. > cylinder 1024). Failing
this, I did have trouble booting.

I use your method myself in some cases, but still prefer to use grub on the MBR.