On Fri, 2004-09-10 at 08:57, Paul Howarth wrote: > Matthew Saltzman wrote: > > On Fri, 10 Sep 2004, Paul Howarth wrote: > >>Even simpler, you could use bootpart (http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm) to > >>add an entry to the XP/NT4/Win2K boot menu (c:\boot.ini) to chain-load grub > >>from the first sector of the /boot partition and then you don't have to fiddle > >>with fdisk at all. The Red Hat / Fedora installers all offer the option of > >>installing the boot loader on the first sector of the root (not boot) > >>partition, so this is vey easy to set up. Using this method, you don't even > >>need grub to be installed on a primary partition. > > > > > > Interesting. I knew that was possible, but I had a working solution so > > never researched how to do it. But it does solve some issues that come up > > with the limitation on primary partitions on some laptops. (If you know > > the format, you can edit c:\boot.ini by hand, but be careful!) > > You still need bootpart (or equivalent) because it writes a short "boot > sector" file that is called up from the boot.ini entry. The program in that > file is customised to chain load the bootloader from the first sector of the > selected partition. Once installed though, you never need to change it unless > your partition table changes. > You can also manually put a file containing the first 512 bytes of the boot sector in c:\, then point the c:\boot.ini to that for booting linux from XP/2K/2K3 I do this regualrly. # dd if=/dev/<boot_part> of=boot.img bs=512 count=1 will give you the boot sector image. Then just put the created boot.img file on c:\ and you have it done after editing boot.ini. > > The grub option actually does offer to install on whatever partition > > contains /boot. If you have a separate /boot (an old habit from when > > /boot needed to be in the first 1024 cylinders), then that's /boot. If > > not, it's /. > > Hmm, never noticed that but it would certainly make sense. > > Cheers, Paul. > >
