[lug] Multi OS booting

David L. Anselmi anselmi at anselmi.us
Sun Nov 20 21:05:20 MST 2005


William Petty wrote:
> 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.

All I've ever done is install Windows on the "first" drive/partition. 
Linux doesn't care.  Sorry, I don't rearrange drives much but if that 
makes Windows painful, just don't do it.  Make it first and leave it alone.

It doesn't really matter which loader you use.  I've let Windows run the 
hda MBR and put LILO on a floppy's MBR.  No floppy, Windows boots and no 
one knows Linux is on the box.  Put in the floppy and Linux boots.

I don't see why booting Windows from GRUB would require drive hiding. 
Sorry if I'm missing your point.

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

Yes, it's trivial.  Just remember that it's what's on the MBR that runs 
when booting, that "lilo" writes LILO to the MBR, and that grub-install 
writes GRUB to the MBR.  You might save yourself some headaches by 
ignoring the partition boot sectors and only using the drive boot 
sectors (i.e., install only to sda, never to sda1).  And if you can 
manage to keep one drive "first" you only ever need to install to that 
boot record.

Dave



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