[lug] Multi OS booting

William Petty billpetty at adelphia.net
Sun Nov 20 14:31:56 MST 2005


If I stay "ALL" SCSI, I may go back to an old trick I used to do. I just
add a switch somewhere on the front panel and tie it to a higher ID jumper
on the lowest drive.  Flip the switch and the drive boot order reverses.  Of
course it gets ugly with lots of drives or SCA backplanes.

Thanks, I'm glad to see I am not the only one fighting this problem.

P.S. Have you ever reverted a machine from grub back to lilo?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "D. Stimits" <stimits at comcast.net>
To: "Boulder (Colorado) Linux Users Group -- General Mailing List" 
<lug at lug.boulder.co.us>
Sent: Sunday, November 20, 2005 1:05 PM
Subject: Re: [lug] Multi OS booting


> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Web Page:  http://lug.boulder.co.us
> Mailing List: http://lists.lug.boulder.co.us/mailman/listinfo/lug
> Join us on IRC: lug.boulder.co.us port=6667 channel=#colug
>
>
> -- 
> No virus found in this incoming message.
> Checked by AVG Free Edition.
> Version: 7.1.362 / Virus Database: 267.13.4/176 - Release Date: 11/20/2005
>
> 




More information about the LUG mailing list