Re: Multi-boot multiple Windows O/Ses and Linux

[Felix Miata]

On 2013-01-17 10:18 (GMT-0500) Lennart Sorensen composed:

> The general behaviour of windows is that it insists on booting from the first 
> windows filesystem.

False. It insists on booting from C:. C: need not be the first M$ native 
filesystem. With normal MBR code, C: will normally be the partition marked 
"active" in the MBR table, which could be a 2nd or 3rd or 4th primary FAT or 
NTFS partition. With Grub on MBR, C: will normally be whichever primary 
partition Grub transfers control to.

> Now certainly if you have XP installed and you then install windows
> 7 and pick a different partition to install to than XP is on, then it
> should create a windows boot menu with both XP and windows 7 on your C:
> partition.  Installing windows will of course trash grub, so you will
> have to boot linux from some other method and reinstall grub to fix
> that afterwards.

Trashing Grub is not necessarily true either. With standard MBR code, 
Windows' boot loader can load a Grub installed to a partition. If Grub was 
installed to a Linux native partition in the first place, Windows won't trash 
Grub, as it only changes code on the MBR or on Windows native partitions.

> Grub does not want a partition, it just uses the space after the partition
> table in track 1 for embedding.

On systems that already use track 1 for other things, Grub must be installed 
somewhere other than on the MBR and sectors following.
--
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words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/