Richard Owlett composed on 2017-04-15 11:35 (UTC-0500): ...
I also discovered there that placing a customized grub in its own partition is not only possible, but recommended in some situations. > I had read somewhere that that option had expired with grub-legacy. That, although taking much time to understand, will solve a *MESS* of grub problems for me ;/
If control is what you want on BIOS disks, limit the action of Grub scripts to / filesystems. Let them do whatever they want, but don't bother using them. Install generic MBR code, put Grub Legacy on an active primary partition, never mount it to /boot, and boot using Grub stanzas you build yourself. At least, that's how I've been doing it for over a decade on more than 25 multiboot machines with as many as 30+ distros each, including on a few systems that include Windows 98, XP, 7, 8 or 10. For this purpose, openSUSE's Grub Legacy, in conjunction with Gfxboot, works best. It facilitates editing on the fly at runtime, which makes it very easy to correct any typos made during manual editing of menu.lst. Trying to use Debian's Grub Legacy is a handicap in that its find command hangs on EXT4 filesystems, limiting utility of its shell.
Creating symlinks to current kernels and initrds leaves little editing to be required of the master bootloader's menu.lst.
https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/legacy/When the point is reached that Grub Legacy cannot any more boot an installation I expect I'll try Syslinux or anything else that happens to provide promise as a bootloader before considering Grub2 for anything more than learning exercises.
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