Format option for chainloading GRUB from BOOTMGR

[Alexei Podtelezhnikov]

Hi all,

Thanks to ideas in [1], I managed to chainload GRUB2 core.img from Windows 7 BOOTMGR. Here is the three steps.

1) Create core.img with *full* direct unmounted path to grub directory starting from partition, for example

grub2-mkimage --output=./core.img --format=i386-pc --prefix=(hd0,1)/grub2 biosdisk part_msdos ext2

2) Concatenate lnxboot.img

cat /boot/grub2/i386-pc/lnxboot.img ./core.img > ./grub2.img

3) Place ./grub2.img onto windows boot partition and configure BCD with bcdedit.exe under Windows to load the file as a BOOTSECTOR application.

It turns out that ./grun2.img can be larger than 512 bytes. BOOTMGR will load it just fine. Now, to be honest, the second step is just annoying. Do you have a format option for grub2-mkimage that would automatically include lnxboot.img? It would make the whole process so much smoother and more logical. Just a suggestion.

Thanks,

Alexei

[1] http://blog.mudy.info/2010/08/boot-grub2-stage2-directly-from-windows-bootmgr-with-grub4dos-stage1/