[lug] Multi OS booting

[D. Stimits]

William Petty wrote:
> I have a system with multiple SCSI drives with a different OS on each 
> drive.
> In the past, I just copied the MBR from the Linux drive (Using DD) to
> C:\BootSec.lin and added it to the windows boot manager.  This always
> worked for LILO, but it fails using grub. When given the choice of OS's,
> and I select Linux, all I get is the word "GRUB" on the screen and nothing
> else happens unless I reset.

Grub always points at an ext2 partition. You could point a windows boot 
loader at a grub MBR, but the grub MBR would then load the ext2. The 
trick I would think is that you must install a grub MBR that points at 
the right partition with the disk order and bios setup that is correct 
when windows boots. If you do anything to change your disk order, you're 
probably going to fail. I don't know if booting windows has any effect 
on the bios drive number, if it does you might have to adjust grub to 
think of drives in the same order that windows does. I've had other bios 
drive number problems mixing scsi and ide which I never solved, 
primarily because there seems to be no way to point grub specifically at 
the other drive type chain such as ide versus scsi...it only understands 
the bios number. It seems that whichever drive chain is chosen in bios 
as the boot drive will cause the other to lose any bios drive number.

> I have looked at going the reverse direction, and adding windows to the
> grub menu, but I do not want to revert to the old hiding/unhiding 
> partitions
> game. (AKA OS-2) Besides, I want the other volumes mounted while
> running Linux.

I'm probably going to try the hiding game, but I'm really nervous. If I 
were to boot up windows just one time when windows thinks I'm booting d: 
instead of c: it'll entirely hose the registry, unrevocably.

Maybe someone on list can tell me, is grub's hide feature capable of 
hiding entire drives, or just partitions? I have things arranged such 
that if pop out a removeable bay drive, it boots windows, otherwise it 
boots linux. If I leave the linux drive in, the windows drive would 
think it is d: (fatal to windows). So before I'm willing to attempt it, 
I have to know if grub can make windows think that d: is now c:.

> My controller will boot the lowest SCSI ID first, but in the case of an IDE
> disk being present, then the motherboard forces the IDE to precede all of
> the SCSI devices with no option of reversing the order.   I.E. I would like
> Windows to be on an IDE drive, thus the boot preference.

I've never found any solution to this.

> P.S.  I have also tried using all SCSI drives.

So far as I know this is the only solution.

D. Stimits, stimits AT comcast DOT net