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Re: clarification re Grub



john gennard wrote:

Have installed the Official snapshot of Sarge dated 7th August.
Everything went silky-smooth. I did leave network configuration
as I wanted to use wifi and in any case didn't know my IP
address.

For the first time, I used grub - the installer did everything for me.
Unfortunately, I have 13 partitions on this very large IDE harddisk,
and I have a lot of them in use (I'm for ever 'looking at' other distros).
The installation found each one and included it in the grub menu.lst.

What I would like to clearly understand is:-
   a. As I finish 'looking at' a distro, can I just eliminate it from the
       menu.lst using a text editor?
   b. I need to compile a 2.6 kernel - do I merely add it to the menu.lst
       and select the default I desire?
   c. When I'm 'looking at' yet another distro (which apparently should
       go into the 'other operating system' section), do I merely do
       whatever the answer to b. is?

Grateful for assistance.                                 John.

Your favourite text editor is (probably) fine for making changes to /boot/grub/menu.lst - I most frequenly use vim.

Debian has a tool for automatically updating grub's menu, and it works out what to put in there by inspecting /boot. It will play with stuff between these two markers:

### BEGIN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

I assume you have grub nicely placed in the master boot record for your drive.

the Debian tool will not know what other kernels and such are around in your other distros: what if you wrote your own filesystem and called it OlympiaDS?

What I recommend is that, for each other OS, you install its boot loader in its partition: hda1, hda2 hda6, hda15 etc in Linux terms.

For each such partition, in grub have an entry modelled on this:
title           Red Hat Linux 7.0
       root            (hd1)
       chainloader     +1


It does not matter whether it's before the above section or after it. This stanza loads LILO, but it could just as well be loading DOS or Darwin.

If you've read closely, you will have noticed it's actually loading the MBR of the second drive.

With this setup I can diddle away with RHL as much as I like, install kernels, remove kernels, reformat the drive and install OS/2: whatever I do, grub on the first drive is unaffected, and whatever is on the second drive will get booted when I choose the RHL 7.0 entry.

It would be exactly similar if I were playing with other paritions on the first drive: I'd have
root (hd0,4)
etc.



--

Cheers
John

-- spambait
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