Re: Installing Grub2 To Manage Window 8+ Systems

[Andrei Borzenkov]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 9:51 PM, Marion Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
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> 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)?
>


In addition to Jordan's explanation - you can create single executable
using grub-mkstandalone (or grub2-mkstandalone depending on how your
distribution packages it). It creates single binary containing all
grub modules and any additional files you specify (including custom
grub.cfg) and does not have any external dependency. This binary can
be put anywhere your EFI system can load it from.

grub-mkstandalone itself can be run on any system, even Windows.
Created file can be simply copied e.g. as \EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI on USB
stick.


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> I don’t know if I am asking questions that make sense yet.
>
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> Any advice will be appreciated.
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