Re: GRUB booting from FAT32?

[Jeff Sheinberg]

Greg Trounson writes:
 > I figured the best(tidiest) way to do this is to have each OS modify 
 > GRUBs menu.lst and set the default before rebooting.  This would mean 
 > putting menu.lst et. al. somewhere where both Windows and Linux can see 
 > them, either installing an EXT2/3 writing driver under windows, or 
 > putting menu.lst on a FAT partition.  After playing with some windows 
 > EXT2 drivers, I decided to go with making the /boot partition FAT.
 > 
 > My /boot resides on a 256MB EXT3 partition at the beginning of the disk 
 > (hda1).
 > 
 > I would much rather use FAT32 than FAT16, as I don't fancy having to 
 > truncate all my kernel names and system maps to 8.3 characters.

Why do you want to put your Linux kernels/initrds on the boot
partition?

Just put the "menu.lst" file along with the rest of the GRUB
executables on the boot partition, then you can easily edit the
contents of this file.

For example, here are a few stanzas from my "menu.lst" file,

    # Entry 6:    Debian 3.0 production [hd0s7]
    title   Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 production [hda7]
    unhide   (hd0,2)
    root     (hd0,6)
    kernel   --no-mem-option /vmlinuz  root=/dev/hda7 ro video=vga16:off

    # Entry 18:    Install Grub to MBR [hd0]
    title   Install Grub to "C:" [hd0] MBR - stage2 on [(hd0,0)/boot/grub/]
    root     (hd0,0)
    install  /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0)  /boot/grub/stage2  p /boot/grub/menu.lst

where (hd0,0) is a DOS FAT16 partition only because my version of
DOS cannot handle FAT32.

-- 
Jeff Sheinberg