[lug] Mixing Ubuntu and Fedora Bootloaders

Sun Dec 22 14:28:07 MST 2019

Use dd to backup the disk, or at least the MBR and boot partition. Then, you can go back if things go awry.

-------- Original message --------
From: "D. Stimits" <stimits at comcast.net> 
Date: 12/22/19  12:48 PM  (GMT-07:00) 
To: duboulder <blug-mail at duboulder.com>, "Boulder (Colorado) Linux Users Group -- General Mailing List" <lug at lug.boulder.co.us> 
Subject: Re: [lug] Mixing Ubuntu and Fedora Bootloaders 

   On December 22, 2019 at 12:30 PM duboulder <blug-mail at duboulder.com> wrote: 

    Don't know about the safety of  changing the 1st stage loader in the GPT partition table. But if your BIOS supports selecting a boot disk at startup then adding another disk would allow you to have multiple boot loaders. 

   ...

   Yup, I already do that...one disk though is purely Windows, and if I set the BIOS to that, then it boots Windows even if I remove the Linux disk. The other disk contains both Ubuntu and Fedora, and I need to put the Fedora bootloader back on to the disk which the update unfortunately caused to be the Ubuntu bootloader. In the past I could just use grub-install from Fedora to do this, but I haven't done this with UEFI, so I don't know if grub-install would do what I want (and if it doesn't, then I probably have an unbootable Linux).

   The Windows disk having its own bootloader is just for safety and independence. I really wanted the Fedora bootloader to chain load Ubuntu instead of Ubuntu directly loading Fedora since there are some differences among them and I normally don't use Ubuntu. Unfortunately, I need Ubuntu for one set of software, and Fedora for another, and the two are mutually exclusive in using the software.

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