Installing Grub2 To Manage Window 8+ Systems

[Marion Smith]

Our company rents hundreds of computers to clients for short term events. The networks can be as large as 200+ laptops per event. To easily deploy these laptops we created years ago a Grub Legacy solution that lets us boot to a Grub menu and have the choice to boot the installed OS or to use Ghost to re-image the hard drive with some other standard OS configuration.

 

With the advent EFI and GPT, we are looking at moving to a Grub 2 with Clonezilla as the imaging software. We are attempting to inject Grub 2 into the EFI partition and have that boot first and show a menu. The only way we have been able to do this is using Ubuntu to install and manage Grub. We are hoping to not have to maintain a Linux partition on the systems if at all possible.

 

Is there a way to install Grub into the EFI partition to work stand alone?

Is there a way to install Grub into the EFI partition but have it reference a FAT partition (that doesn’t have an OS) for the config files?

Can we direct Grub to reference the config files in a folder in the EFI partition?

Would a live type installation work better (like the live USB from Clonezilla)?

 

 

I don’t know if I am asking questions that make sense yet.

 

Any advice will be appreciated.