Damn Grubs

[HTM~Par]

Who would have known that windows was so picky

Has any one else ever tried to dual boot using GRUB?

I finally got it to work after numerous searches on google and many failed attempts. It is really simple once you know what the hell these 'tutorials' show you to do. Damn windows is such a whiny OS. I hate not having windows (some things just done work well on linux, though most things do work) but at the same time I despise it to it's very core!

Well enough ranting, and more getting to the point.

I believe that I now have a workable knowledge of the GRUB boot loader, so if anyone needs any help getting stuff to work with it just drop me a line and I will try to help you.


/end-whining-session

[HTM~ZenEye]

i tried that dual boot my self and yes it is a bitch. thank god i had me linux+ book with me. i didn't get it working anyway, don't you have to copy a couple files onto the windows partition so the windows os selector will launch grub? is it any easier with new fedoras?

[HTM~Par]

i tried that dual boot my self and yes it is a bitch. thank god i had me linux+ book with me. i didn't get it working anyway, don't you have to copy a couple files onto the windows partition so the windows os selector will launch grub? is it any easier with new fedoras?

No, no file copying to the win partition is needed. All that you need is some crafty use of the grub.conf file. Also, the windows OS selector is crap, so you should install grub on the MBR (master boot record) so that grub is loaded right after the BIOS xfers control to the HDD

In my grub.conf I have a few settings that allow for me to dual boot win xp along with my fedora 7.

The following is all done on a shell (terminal):

If you are using fedora 7, log into the root account and

gedit /boot/grub/grub.conf

or as a regular user mount the /boot partition using either

sudo mount /boot

or use the 'su' command and enter your root password and mount the /boot part.

Next

sudo gedit /boot/grub/grub.conf

or if you used 'su' then plain

gedit /boot/grub/grub.conf

then add this to the file

# title line can be changed to anything you want.  This is how it will show up on the boot menu

title WinXP
      # anything with the '#' symbol is a comment :-P
      # hd0 is the hard disk number, counting starts at 0
      # 0 is the partition number, also starting at 0
      # (hd0,0) should represent the disk and partition on which your windows is installed
    ` # the 'unhide' is done since grub sometimes hides dos partitions
      # FYI: use 'fdisk -l' at a terminal to find which hard disk and partition XP (NTFS) is on

    unhide (hd0,0)

      # uncomment the next two lines ONLY if you are trying to boot XP from the 2nd hard disk

    #map (hd0) (hd1)
    #map map (hd1) (hd0)

      # 'rootnoverify' will set the root partition for grub to load xp
      # this should match the harddisk and partition used in 'unhide' above

    rootnoverify (hd0,0)

      # 'chainloader +1' tells grub to load the bootloader for xp, since grub cannot directly 
      ##    boot the windows kernel as it can linux

    chainloader +1

      # 'makeactive' makes the windows partition an active primary partition, needed to boot windows

    makeactive

      # and there you have it.  Windows should boot perfectly, as long as the partitions are set properly

or more condensed

title WinXP
    unhide (hd0,0)
    #map (hd0) (hd1)
    #map map (hd1) (hd0)
    rootnoverify (hd0,0)
    chainloader +1
    makeactive

[HTM~ZenEye]

ah see you did the other way, i tried using win boot loader. this way seems much easier, i wish windows wasn't such a bitch about being the first partition.

even better idea: VMware

[HTM~Par]

vmware sucks (IMO) because its a VM, and by design they are slower. Windows just needs to be on the first HDD which is stupid, but the 'map' directives in the grub.conf fix this easily (I like how everytime windows breaks something, the community fixes it faster than M$. And I would be willing to bet you that the only reason that win needs to be on the first HDD is because of a lazy designer's thinking that people who use windows will ONLY use windows. Stupid software engineers...

[HTM~ZenEye]

i like VM tech for unbreakability. you can royally fuck your VM then just delete it and copy from backup, boom pristine system. Also you can have multiple VHD files on one physical drive and use VMware server to select which one(s) to start. It's like thin clients, disk imaging and multi-boots in one, instead of managing disk images you manage VHD files, much easier than re-imaging all the time. Not to mention efficient resource allocation and different HALs. Like in a server environment, you could turn one physical machine into many logical machines each with just enough resources (i.e. memory).

as far as performance, yeah i see what your saying, but if your only running one VM and its using all the physical resources...

ok ill stop now...

p.s. VMware runs on linux too lol cant stop

[HTM~Par]

yea, i dont break OSes all too often, so I dont have the reimaging problems :P

[HTM~ZenEye]

yea, i dont break OSes all too often, so I dont have the reimaging problems :P

Ha Ha Ha smart ass lol. Have fun making all sorts of partitions and filesystems for each OS you have, and rebooting all the time to switch OS's. Then when your hard drive dies from all the extra rebooting and swapping, you'll have done all that configuring for naught.
It would be better to buy a buttload of RAM and multicore processors that support hardware based virtualization, then run an OS that can take full advantage of your hardware (linux 64 bit) and run VMware for all your other OS's.Trust me, you give a virtual machine enough RAM and go full screen, you won't notice that much of a performance hit. Virtualization is faster than emulation, so it would be better than Wine or at least as good.

VM tech is the future, learn it, know it, love it.